Editorial Standards
Acid Capitalist is written by language models working from public market data, and it is free to read. This page says what that means in practice: where the numbers come from, which rules each kind of piece is written under, what our scheduled writers check before anything is stored, and where to send an error.
How We Report
Our scheduled formats are written from a brief, not from memory. Market Pulse, AC Signal, The Read, the liquidity, COT and auction commentaries and the narratives on stock pages are written by a model working from a brief that our code assembles from stored market data. The model cannot search or read the web while it writes them.
Since 2 September 2026 those writers carry a fixed set of rules in their instructions: every figure must come from the brief, arithmetic is shown or left out, estimates are labelled as estimates, a figure carries its date and its unit, a missing number is written as unknown, a claim made by someone else is reported as their claim, no quote or source is invented, and a headline may not claim more than the body supports.
Bylined articles work differently. The pieces under persona bylines in News, Markets, Fed, Macro, Smart Money, Opinion and Media are written by writers that pull current figures from Finnhub and FRED and may also search and read the web for news context. The rules above were added to their instructions on 16 September 2026. Bylined articles published before that date were written without them.
Some things never go out. A Market Pulse edition whose prices have not moved since the last one is held back as a draft instead of being dressed up as news, and AC Signal writes nothing when fewer than four of its six data inputs are fresh. The hourly Read writes nothing new when its inputs have not changed. Each scheduled writer runs mechanical checks on its own copy before anything is stored. A reply that fails goes back to the model with the failures listed, and if it still fails, nothing is stored.
Sources And Data
The market data behind our charts, tables and scheduled commentary comes from these sources, fetched by code on a schedule:
- FRED, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis database: the Fed balance sheet, reverse repo, the Treasury General Account, bank reserves, Treasury yields, real yields, credit spreads, SOFR and the VIX. It feeds the liquidity tracker and the leading indicators.
- Finnhub: stock quotes, earnings, analyst recommendations and part of the news intake.
- SEC EDGAR 13F filings: the quarterly holdings of roughly 10,500 institutional filers, behind Smart Money and the ownership data on stock pages.
- CFTC Commitments of Traders: weekly futures positioning, behind the COT report.
- US Treasury Fiscal Data: auction results, which our code grades for the auction tracker.
- CBOE: the equity put/call ratio and option volume.
- Yahoo Finance: index quotes and the day's movers.
Market Pulse also reads CoinGecko for crypto prices, Frankfurter for currency exchange rates and the CNN Fear and Greed index.
Know the lag before you trade on it. A 13F filing shows what a fund held on the last day of a quarter and can arrive up to 45 days later, so our 13F pages describe what funds held, not what they hold today. COT data is weekly and also arrives days after the positions it reports. Our liquidity feed fetches only the five most recent observations of each FRED series, so a revision FRED makes to an older figure does not reach the tracker on its own.
How We Use AI
A model wrote the words of every article, briefing, commentary and explainer on this site. That is the design, and it is how a free site covers this much ground.
In the scheduled formats the split is strict. Code fetches the data, computes the percentiles and grades, and builds the brief. The model writes the words around those numbers. Two of those formats also check the model's figures against the data before storing anything. In Market Pulse, every percentage in the copy must match, after rounding, a price move of an asset in that edition or the edition's what-if return. In AC Signal, every figure written with a dollar sign, a percent sign, basis points, a decimal point or a thousands separator must match a number in the brief. Whole numbers written on their own, such as "four of six", are not checked.
Bylines such as Marcus Reid are writer personas: a fixed voice and a fixed beat given to a model. They are not people.
The Read and the narratives on stock pages publish automatically once their checks pass, and no person reads them first.
What a reader sees on the page varies by format. Many bylined articles end with an author note that describes the writer as an AI-powered author. The video decoder is marked AI-drafted at the top of its page. Market Pulse, AC Signal, The Read, the commentaries and the stock narratives carry no label of their own. This page covers all of them.
Corrections
Found a wrong number, a misread filing, or a claim the data does not support? Write to hello@acidcapitalist.com with the link and what is wrong. A link to the source helps most: on a data site, an error can start upstream, in a revised series, an amended filing or a feed that stopped updating.
Advertising And Funding
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Not Investment Advice
Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything, and we are not licensed to give personal financial advice. Read the full disclaimer before you act on anything you read here.
Who We Are
Acid Capitalist is published by TH Media OÜ in Tallinn, Estonia, European Union. Questions, tips and complaints go through the contact page.