What does The Distributed measure?
A live read on what the market’s crowd is saying. We stream public discussion from finance communities, find the companies and assets being talked about, score the tone with a financial language model, and roll it into figures that always show the sample behind them. Every number names its source, and where a source isn’t ours, we say so.
How does a Reddit post become a figure?
Five steps, in this order: stream, clean, extract, score, roll up.
Stream the social tape
We stream posts and comments from a fixed set of ten finance subreddits (r/wallstreetbets, r/stocks, r/investing, r/options, r/ETFs, r/commodities, r/cryptocurrency, r/ausfinance, r/ASX_Bets and r/ASX), capturing each with its timestamp, author and score.
Strip the noise
Bot templates, quoted replies and boilerplate are removed before anything is measured, so automated and copy-paste content cannot inflate a reading.
Find the entities
A named-entity recogniser, paired with a cashtag parser and a curated reference dictionary, pulls tickers, company names, ETFs, commodities and macro indicators out of raw text. Each extraction carries a confidence score built from several signals — how it was matched, the surrounding financial context, whether it is a known ambiguous word — and only mentions above a threshold are counted.
Read the sentiment
FinBERT classifies every surviving mention as positive, neutral or negative on a −1 to +1 scale. It reads formal financial text well — around 89% agreement with human labels in reported benchmarks — and slips on the sarcasm and irony common on social platforms, closer to 70%, so we treat every score as an estimate, not a verdict.
Roll it up
Mentions are normalised to a canonical ticker and rolled into hourly and daily figures — volume, net sentiment, and the bull / neutral / bear split. As they are aggregated, low-trust and bot-like accounts are down-weighted, and coordinated spikes are screened by testing author diversity against volume. Every figure is shown with the sample size behind it.
How should you read a sentiment score?
Scores run from −1.00 to +1.00. They describe the balance of bullish and bearish mentions, never a price target. Always read a score with the mention count beside it: the same +0.40 means very different things at 50 mentions and at 5,000.
- Bearish
- −1.00 to −0.10
- Neutral
- −0.10 to +0.10
- Bullish
- +0.10 to +1.00
How is the economic indicators board built?
The economic indicators board has four pages: Global, Australia, United States and Crowd.
- One page per market
- Global, Australia and the United States each have their own address. A country page holds only that country’s data: its readings, its release dates and its own stock indices. Australia adds pump prices and wholesale electricity, from its country pages. The map compares economies on the Global page only; Reddit has its own Crowd page.
- The map
- One indicator at a time. An economy is shaded when we hold a reading for it; the table under the map lists the same readings with the period and the next release. Levels shade darker the higher they are.
- Index levels
- Index levels belong to the companies that publish them, so the board follows each index through a licensed fund that tracks it: Finazon end-of-day closes for the US and country funds, Cboe Australia closes for the ASX funds, with their one- and three-month moves.
- Reddit topics
- Every macro term with its own page, from the macro ledger on the Reddit board, counted over 30 days. The small line is the topic’s daily mentions over the same 30 days; net sentiment runs from −1 (all bearish) to +1 (all bullish).
- What this is not
- Readings, dates and counts, not forecasts or advice. An inverted curve has come before past recessions; it is not a date.
How is the Reddit board built?
The Reddit board counts finance mentions across the ten subreddits we track, with the authors behind them.
- Mentions and authors
- A mention is one post or comment naming a company, fund, coin, commodity or macro term after the steps above. Authors are the distinct accounts behind those mentions over the same days, so a busy author counts once.
- Ratio scale
- Where the lines on a chart differ a lot in size, the scale is a ratio (log) scale: equal steps up the axis are equal percentage changes, so a small name's rise reads as clearly as a large one's.
- Moving together
- How closely two names move together is a Pearson correlation between their daily Reddit mention counts over 30 days: how often the two are discussed together, never a price relationship. It runs from −1 (opposite) to +1 (together).
How is the insider trading board built?
The insider trading board reads every insider filing on SEC Form 4.
- What we read
- Every insider filing on SEC Form 4, newest first: open-market buys and sells, awards, option exercises, tax withholding and gifts.
- Which trades count as buying
- Only true open-market purchases, transaction code P. Stock awards, option exercises and gifts are left out: they are pay, not a choice to buy.
- Cluster insider buying
- A company is listed when, inside the trailing 30 days, at least 3 distinct insiders bought a combined 50K USD or more, or at least 2 insiders bought 1M USD or more. Refreshed every 4 hours.
- Shares and holding
- Each Form 4 line gives the shares traded, the price and the shares the insider holds after the trade. Holding change is the trade as a share of what they held before it: a small sale out of a large holding reads very differently from selling half.
- Reddit, 30 days
- In the cluster tab, the same company's mentions across the subreddits we track over the same 30 days; under 10 mentions reads as not discussed.
- Checking a row
- Every company in the cluster tab opens to the exact filings behind it, each linking to the SEC document.
- What this is not
- Insiders can be early, wrong or averaging down. A buying cluster is disclosed conviction, not a recommendation.
How is the politicians board built?
The politicians board reads what members of Congress and of the Parliament of Australia disclose.
- What we read
- Every periodic transaction report filed with the Clerk of the US House, and the Australian Parliament's registers of interests.
- Countries
- Each country has its own page and address, /data/politicians and /data/politicians/au, with its own tabs, because each discloses something different. The United States discloses trades; Australia's registers record holdings, without amounts or trade dates.
- Amounts
- Members disclose each trade as a range, such as 1K to 15K USD, never an exact value. Largest sorts by the bottom of the range.
- Dates
- Trade date is when the trade happened; Filed is when it became public, up to 45 days later by law. Days to file is the gap between the two.
- Who is trading right now
- The members in the newest disclosures, each opening to the trades behind them. A stock bought by more than one member in the window is called out in the answer.
- Estimated returns
- Net return is every disclosed trade's move since its trade date, weighted by the disclosed range; vs SPY is that against SPY over the same days. An estimate from ranges, not exact values, and not investment advice.
- Party
- Party is a label. Nothing on this board is ranked, summed or described by party.
- What this is not
- A disclosure is a member following the law, not a sign of wrongdoing, and a trade is not a recommendation.
How is the funds board built?
Institutional managers with over $100 million in Section 13(f) securities must report their US-listed holdings to the SEC each quarter, within 45 days of quarter end. The funds board downloads every new filing straight from EDGAR, compares it with the manager’s previous quarter and publishes the differences; see what a 13F filing is. A manager who stops filing stays listed with their last filing and a “quarters behind” flag, never a stale portfolio presented as current. Stock book is the stock-only long value at quarter end; options are excluded because 13F values them at notional. Values are as filed.
How is the fails-to-deliver board built?
The fails-to-deliver board reads the SEC's fails-to-deliver files.
- What we read
- The SEC's fails-to-deliver files. Each month comes in two halves: the first half is posted at the end of the month, the second around the 15th of the next, so the newest figure is already weeks old when it arrives.
- Balance
- The shares still undelivered on a settlement day: old fails, new fails and fails settled that day, netted. It is not a count of new fails, and it cannot tell you how old any fail is.
- Streak
- Settlement days in a row a stock has been on the list, up to the latest file. A long streak means the balance never reached zero in that time.
- Value and scale
- Value is the balance times the previous day's close, as the file gives it, wherever the file carries a price. Scale sets the balance against the stock's normal daily trading volume or its shares outstanding where we hold them, and shows the share count otherwise.
- The record
- Every settlement-day balance in the board's record window, for the stocks on this board; the full history stays on file.
- What this is not
- Fails happen for ordinary reasons: paperwork, ETF creation and redemption, corporate actions. The SEC says they are not necessarily caused by short selling and are not evidence of abusive or naked short selling. We show what is on the list and when; we never guess at a cause.
How is the sectors board built?
The sectors board sets each sector's fund against its Reddit chatter.
- The levels
- Sectors follow GICS, the standard that sorts every company into one of each. A row opens to the level below it. Themes sit outside GICS, because a theme cuts across sectors.
- Funds
- Each sector shows its SPDR sector fund; each theme the specialist funds whose holdings set its members.
- Reddit counts
- A row's count is the mentions of its own words plus its member stocks over 30 complete days.
- Mentions
- A post naming “solar” and First Solar counts under both, so totals are mentions, not posts.
- The week
- The last 7 complete days against the 7 before.
- What this is not
- A sector's chatter and its fund's move are measured, not explained; neither is a recommendation.
How is the government contracts board built?
The government contracts board reads the award notices on the public registers.
- What we read
- The award notices on the public registers: USAspending, AusTender, Find a Tender, TED, DECP, TenderNed and GEPS. Each winner is matched to the listed company it belongs to, and the company's full record lives on its stock page.
- Market
- The market the winning company is listed in, not the buyer's country: a company listed in Switzerland can win a contract in Czechia. Every market has its own page at /data/contracts/ and its two-letter code, the same codes the country pages use.
- Values and dates
- A value appears where the register publishes one, in the currency it was awarded in; value bands therefore mix currencies across markets. The date is the register's notice date, not the signing date.
- What this is not
- An award is not revenue booked and not a recommendation. We show what the registers publish and when.
How is the calendar built?
The calendar lists the dates that move markets, each from the body that sets it.
- Where the dates come from
- FOMC dates come from the Federal Reserve's published calendar; macro release dates from the BLS and BEA release calendars; earnings dates from company filings via SEC EDGAR. Filing deadlines are worked out from the SEC's own rules.
- FOMC minutes
- Three weeks after each meeting, at 14:00 ET, computed from the Committee's three-week rule.
- FOMC blackout
- From the second Saturday before a meeting to the Thursday after it, computed from the Committee's published rule.