— The pitch line —
Got a folklore correlation we should look at?
Many of our best signals — McRib, Mercury retrograde, presidential illness clusters — started as someone's offhand 'I bet this correlates with the market.' If you have one, drop it below. We read every submission. The good ones get the AutoResearch treatment.
What makes a good submission
The best suggestions share three traits:
- A specific, measurable thing. “Number of McRib reappearances” works. “General consumer sentiment” doesn't — we already have a dozen of those.
- A plausible economic story. Why might this lead (or lag) the market? You don't have to be right — you just have to give us a theory we can test.
- A public data source. If we can't get the data without breaking a paywall or scraping a site that hates scrapers, we can't build the indicator.
We'll reply to good suggestions within a week or so. We don't pay for tips, but if your idea becomes a published indicator we'll cite you (handle of your choice) on the indicator's detail page and in the next dispatch.
The pitch
A few things we won't accept
- Anything that requires hacking or scraping a site that explicitly forbids it. We respect robots.txt and ToS.
- Insider information. If your “data source” is your friend at a public company, that's material non-public info — not an indicator.
- Crypto pump-and-dumps dressed up as “a new sentiment signal.” We won't help.
- Shorteners or sketchy domains. Paste the full URL so we can see exactly where the data lives.