Editorial Policy

Our standards

Financial education is an area where bad information is profitable to publish and expensive to act on. These are the rules every page on this site is held to.

We show the arithmetic

Where a claim rests on a calculation (a bond price at a new yield, an option's breakeven, the gain needed after a drawdown, the cost of a fee over thirty years), the calculation appears on the page with real numbers so you can check it rather than take our word for it. Calculator pages show a worked example whose figures match the tool's defaults.

We do not invent statistics

Pattern "success rates", trader failure percentages and similar figures circulate widely with no traceable source. We do not repeat them. Where we cannot name the source in the sentence, we describe behavior qualitatively rather than attach a number that would sound more authoritative than it deserves. Institutional facts (settlement cycles, regulatory thresholds, index construction rules) are stated as facts.

We publish failure conditions

Every guide to a method, instrument or indicator states the conditions under which it does not work, with the same seriousness as the conditions under which it does. A guide that only explains when something succeeds is marketing.

We separate fact from judgement

Definitions, mechanics and arithmetic are stated as fact. Opinions about what is useful in practice are framed as opinion and, in the Desk Notes posts, written in the first person so the line is clear.

How content is produced

1. Scope. We define the exact question a page should answer and which reader is asking it.
2. Draft. Written by whoever covers that topic, to explain the mechanism and not to reach a word count.
3. Technical review. A second writer checks definitions, arithmetic and worked examples line by line.
4. Clarity review. Jargon is defined the first time it appears or removed; circular explanations are rewritten.
5. Publication. Substantive later changes are noted on the page with the date.

The reference guides and quizzes are drafted with AI assistance at step two, under the direction of whoever covers that topic, and every one of them says so in the credit line under its heading. The Desk Notes are not drafted that way, and they are signed. No AI produces a price, an indicator value or a recommendation, and none of it moves a page past steps three to five. We have written out exactly what the tools do and what they are never allowed to do on how we use AI.

Bylines

There are none, and that is deliberate. A byline claims a person wrote the page unaided, which for the reference material here would be false. Instead every page names the person who reviewed and edited it, which is the claim we can stand behind. The three of them are listed on who reviews this site.

Nothing goes live with nobody having looked at it, and the page tells you who looked. We do not lean on credentials to make an argument, and we do not claim any for our reviewers. A guide here has to stand on whether its reasoning is sound and its arithmetic checks out, which is why the working is printed on the page where you can check it yourself.

Market data

The scanners (screener, heatmap, breadth, candlestick scanner, yield curve, correlation matrix) are rebuilt after each US close from public sources: the published S&P 500 constituent list, daily price bars from Yahoo Finance, and the U.S. Treasury's daily par yield curve. Every indicator is computed by our own code from those daily bars, and the rules used (for example, the exact definition of a hammer candle) are published on the relevant page. The data is delayed, can contain errors from the source, and is for education only. Each scanner shows its as-of date.

Updates and corrections

Our guides are reference material, so they are maintained rather than archived. Pages are revised when we find a clearer explanation, when a rule or threshold changes, or when a reader points out an error. If you find a factual error, please tell us. Corrections are our highest-priority form of reader feedback, are made promptly, and substantive ones are noted on the page. Use the contact page.

Independence

We do not accept payment for coverage, do not publish sponsored articles presented as editorial, and do not take broker or fund affiliate commissions in exchange for recommendations. Where a company or fund is named it is as a neutral illustration of a mechanism, never as a recommendation. If the site carries advertising in future it will be clearly labelled and will have no influence on editorial content.

What we do not do

We do not publish trade signals, price predictions, stock picks or market forecasts, and we do not provide personal financial advice. See the risk disclaimer for the full statement.