Valdrans Market Pulse

Methodology

What counts as a story. Ingested items are grouped into stories by embedding-based clustering, so one real-world event arriving from many outlets is counted once. A cluster is counted as a corroborated story only when at least two distinct sources independently reported it — a single source cannot manufacture a story. Market stories additionally carry a pipeline magnitude score; breaking-news clusters count as stories only when our classification tier marks them market-relevant (HIGH or MEDIUM). Lower tiers remain visible in the “clusters tracked” figure but are never called stories.

Stories vs source items. “Source items processed” counts individual classified inputs (one story typically arrives as several source items). The two quantities are reported separately and never conflated.

Week boundary and snapshot timing. Weeks are ISO weeks, Monday 00:00 UTC to the following Monday 00:00 UTC (exclusive), bucketed by first-seen time. Each snapshot is computed Mondays at approximately 05:45 UTC. Published snapshots are immutable: corroboration that arrives after the snapshot is not retroactively recounted. Retrospectively computed (“backfilled”) weeks use final cluster state and are flagged as such.

Classification provenance. Story grouping, categories, magnitudes and tiers are assigned by our LLM-assisted, human-reviewed editorial pipeline; the Pulse counts themselves are computed by plain database arithmetic — no model output enters the numbers. Category and sector labels reflect the pipeline’s vocabulary as-is; figures may include a negligible number of internal test items.

Quality gates and revisions. A week is published only if internal consistency checks pass and volumes are within an expected band of the trailing median; failing weeks are held for human review, and weeks below a minimum activity floor are skipped. Corrections to a published week, if ever required, are announced on our corrections page. Methodology version: 1.

Reuse. The Pulse is free to quote and reuse with attribution to Valdrans (CC BY 4.0), citing valdrans.com/pulse. It is information about news flow, not investment advice.