How it works
Methodology, calibration, and limits
A briefing product is only as honest as its methodology page. We publish ours so you can decide how much weight to give the briefing.
The pipeline
Every Sunday at 8 PM ET, an autonomous AI agent (Anthropic Claude) is given five tools and asked to produce a structured weekly briefing on QQQ. Tools are simple, auditable, and deterministic where possible:
get_prices
yfinance · adjusted closes
Daily OHLCV for QQQ, last 52 weeks.
get_news
Polygon.io · news + sentiment
Recent headlines for QQQ + top 10 holdings, with per-article sentiment.
get_macro
FRED · point-in-time vintages
Fed funds, CPI, unemployment, 10-year yield, VIX.
get_earnings_calendar
Finnhub
Earnings events for the target week.
compute_indicators
in-house numpy
RSI(14), MACD(12,26,9), Bollinger Bands(20, 2σ).
submit_forecast
schema-validated
Final structured output: per-signal direction + reasoning + commentary.
How confidence is computed
The model never picks a confidence number itself. It chooses a direction for each of three independent signal categories (macro, technical, sentiment), and the platform computes confidence deterministically from the alignment.
| Signal pattern | Direction | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| All 3 agree | Aligned direction | 75% |
| 2 of 3 agree, weight-aligned | Majority direction | 60% |
| 2 of 3 agree, heaviest signal dissents | Majority direction | 55% |
| 1 signal stands, others split / neutral | Single signal direction | 45% |
| Split decision (e.g. 1 bull / 1 bear / 1 neutral) | Neutral | 50% |
Default signal weights: macro 0.40, technical 0.35, sentiment 0.25. These are tuning parameters and may change post-launch.
Honest calibration
We backtested the agent on the trailing 0 weeks of QQQ history. Each historical Sunday, the agent was invoked with tools clipped to data available at that date — no future-knowledge leakage.
Forecasts scored
0
Strict win rate
—
Always-bullish baseline
55.8%
What this means. Over the last 0 weeks, naive "always predict bullish" would have been right 55.8% of the time. Beating that baseline on a 1-week QQQ horizon is genuinely hard — most professional fund managers don't. The directional lean we publish is one input among many; we recommend treating the per-signal breakdown and commentary as the primary value.
Weighted accuracy (giving partial credit for near-misses, e.g. a bullish call when the market closes flat) is —. Both numbers are recomputed every Sunday after the previous week's close.
See full track record →What this is not
- Not investment advice. Educational research product. We don't know your portfolio, risk tolerance, or goals.
- Not real-time. One briefing per week, generated Sunday night, valid until next Sunday.
- Not a magic predictor. The directional call is wrong roughly as often as it is right. Read the commentary.
- Not personalized. Same briefing for every subscriber. We don't take portfolio data or trade on your behalf.
- Not financial advice. Consult a licensed advisor before making investment decisions.
Data sources
- yfinance — Adjusted historical OHLCV for QQQ.
- FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) — Macro series with point-in-time vintages so backtests don't cheat.
- Polygon.io — News headlines, summaries, and per-article sentiment for QQQ + top 10 holdings.
- Finnhub — Earnings calendar.
- Anthropic Claude (via Amazon Bedrock) — The agent that synthesizes the above into the briefing.