Coverage
Coverage guide
The journal's editorial map: five threads of machine-read financial news, the checks behind each one, and how a topic turns into an article. Free to read, ordered by curiosity rather than by a calendar.
Signal fundamentals
Where tone comes from before any model runs.
- Loughran–McDonald word lists, and why finance needs its own
- VADER-style scoring engines and their blind spots
- Annotated news corpora — who labels the text, and how they disagree
Machine reading
How modern models read sentences, not words.
- FinBERT-family classifiers: training data, versions, drift
- Named-entity recognition on company mentions
- Multilingual news — tone across languages and wire services
From headline to index
The arithmetic between one article and one number.
- Aggregation weights: story volume, recency, outlet reach
- Headline-versus-body scoring, and what each predicts
- Published sentiment indexes — how to read their moving parts
Honest testing
What makes a sentiment claim testable rather than decorative.
- Backtest design: windows, costs, turnover
- Overfitting stories, and how they get exposed
- Academic findings translated into working English, including Tetlock's 2007 evidence on media tone and markets
Failure modes
Where readers get burned if they trust the read blindly.
- Sarcasm, irony and the recycled-alert problem
- Boilerplate language in filings and rating actions
- Press releases and bot output scoring as if they were news
How a topic becomes an article
- A concrete question. Each piece starts from a question narrow enough to answer: what does this index actually measure? — never just a mood.
- Rebuild from primary sources. The model card, the paper, the filing, the newsroom's own description. Second-hand summaries are used for direction, not as evidence.
- Run the five checks. The gate from the front page — source, model, baseline, granularity, failure. Anything unprovable is labelled exploratory, not established.
- Publish free, invite challenge. Articles stay free to read; disagreements reach the desk and are answered where other readers can see the exchange.
Bring a question to the desk. Coverage that answers reader questions beats coverage that answers a content calendar — the inbox is where threads get sharpened.