The rules, briefly.

Standard Poorly is a publication operated by Wendell Labs LLC, a Missouri limited liability company (“we,” “us,” “our”). It is not investment advice, financial advice, legal advice, tax advice, or any other professional advice. The indicators we publish are statistical curiosities that may or may not have predictive value, and the entire premise of the site is that most of them probably don't. Nothing on the site is an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security, commodity, derivative, or other financial instrument.

The brand, name, voice, and editorial framing are works of parody and satire of the financial-publishing genre. Where the law affords parody and satire affirmative defense, we claim it. If you make trading, investment, or any other consequential decisions based on Standard Poorly, you do so entirely at your own risk. We accept no liability for losses, missed gains, hurt feelings, or social embarrassment caused by quoting us at a dinner party.

Wendell Labs LLC is not a registered investment adviser, broker, broker-dealer, futures commission merchant, commodity trading advisor, or financial planner, and is not registered with or licensed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, FINRA, the CFTC, the NFA, or any state securities regulator. We do not manage money, hold customer funds, or execute trades.

Everything we publish is general and impersonal commentary, distributed identically to every reader. It is not personalized to you. We do not know your portfolio, income, net worth, risk tolerance, time horizon, tax situation, or objectives, and nothing on the site is tailored to them. No content here is a recommendation that any security or strategy is suitable for you.

Using Standard Poorly does not create an adviser-client, broker-customer, fiduciary, or other special relationship between you and us, and we owe you no fiduciary duty. You are solely responsible for your own trading and investment decisions. Before acting on anything you read here, independently verify it and consult your own licensed financial, legal, and tax advisers who can account for your specific circumstances.

Hit-rates, returns, “outperformance” figures, ledgers (including the pundit-portfolio / Bestie Buys tracker), and any strategy results we publish are historical, hypothetical, and/or backtested unless explicitly stated otherwise. They do not represent the results of any actual account.

Hypothetical and backtested performance has inherent limitations. It is calculated with the benefit of hindsight, does not represent actual trading, and does not account for the financial risk of trading real money. It may not reflect the impact of fees, commissions, borrowing costs, short-borrow availability, slippage, taxes, liquidity, or the emotional reality of holding a losing position. No representation is being made that any account will, or is likely to, achieve results similar to those shown.

Past performance is not indicative of future results. We do not guarantee that any indicator, signal, screen, or strategy will produce any particular result or outcome. Many of the correlations we surface are statistical noise that survived a large multi-hypothesis search by chance — we publish those too, with their full test statistics, precisely so you can judge them for what they are.

You may:

• Read the site for personal or commercial use
• Share links to any page
• Embed individual indicator cards with attribution back to standardpoorly.com
• Quote our text in publications, with attribution and a link
• Use our public API within its published rate limits
• Use the data for journalism, academia, criticism, parody, or non-commercial research

You may not:

• Scrape the entire site to rebuild it or any meaningful subset of it elsewhere — automated tools may consume the public API or feeds, but wholesale page-scraping is prohibited
• Use Standard Poorly content as training data for a foundation model
• Resell our data, our analysis, or any derivative product as a paid feed without a written license from us
• Present our numbers without their accompanying disclaimers
• Impersonate Standard Poorly (e.g. publish content under our name, register confusingly similar domains, or run unauthorized social accounts using our branding)
• Use the site to make automated trading decisions through a brokerage API without your own independent risk management — we are explicit: do not point Interactive Brokers at our hit-rate column
• Probe the site for vulnerabilities outside a coordinated disclosure

The free tier of Standard Poorly is publicly accessible without an account. The newsletter requires an email address (see Privacy Policy). When the Analyst and Trader tiers launch, accounts will use magic-link sign-in (no passwords stored), and subscriptions will be billed monthly or annually with seven-day refunds for any reason.

When you purchase a paid subscription, you will be asked to affirmatively accept these terms — a checkbox you must tick — before payment is taken. Your acceptance, the version of these terms in effect at that moment, and the time of acceptance are recorded. Continuing to a paid plan without that acceptance is not possible.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these terms or that we reasonably suspect of abuse. We will tell you why and give you a 14-day cure window for ambiguous cases. For clear violations (e.g. wholesale scraping, payment fraud, harassment of staff) we may suspend immediately.

We participate in brokerage and financial-product affiliate programs. When a link earns us a commission if you sign up, it will be clearly labeled with the word “sponsored” or “affiliate” in plain text adjacent to the link, in compliance with FTC 16 CFR Part 255. We do not embed affiliate links in editorial copy without that label.

Sponsored newsletter sections will be set off with a clear “Sponsored by [name]” header. Sponsorship buys exposure in clearly-marked editorial slots; it does not buy ranking, surfacing, or any methodology change. The algorithm that decides which indicators surface on the home page is the same regardless of whether a sponsor exists for that category.

If you ever spot a correlation that looks like it shouldn't be on the front page — i.e. you suspect editorial influence by a sponsor — email legal@standardpoorly.com and we will investigate and publish the audit.

The Standard Poorly name, logo, layout, code, editorial copy, methodology documents, indicator names, the “SP-NNNN” numbering convention, and the curated indicator catalog are all copyright Wendell Labs LLC and protected as compilation works. You may quote and embed under fair use; you may not republish wholesale.

The underlying public data we ingest (FRED series, weather observations, government statistics, etc.) is in the public domain or licensed by its original source. We don't claim ownership of the underlying numbers; we claim ownership of the analysis, framing, and presentation we built around them.

User-submitted content (e.g. comments, when we add them) remains the user's IP, but you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to display it on the site and quote it in derivative works (including the newsletter) with attribution.

If we publish a number that is wrong, we will correct it on the original page, dated, with the original number visible (typically struck through). If the correction materially changes a published forecast, we will send a follow-up newsletter labeled CORRECTION and retain the corrected page in our public archive.

We respect intellectual property rights and require our users to do the same. If you believe content on Standard Poorly infringes your copyright, send a notice to our designated DMCA agent at legal@standardpoorly.com including: (i) your physical or electronic signature; (ii) identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed; (iii) identification of the allegedly infringing content with enough detail for us to locate it; (iv) your contact information; (v) a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized by the copyright owner; and (vi) a statement under penalty of perjury that the information in your notice is accurate.

We honor counter-notices following the same statutory procedure. Repeat infringers will have their accounts terminated.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Standard Poorly is provided “AS IS” and “AS AVAILABLE” without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or accuracy. We make no guarantee that the site will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free from harmful components.

We do not warrant or guarantee that any data, indicator, signal, price, statistic, chart, or analysis on the site is accurate, complete, current, or reliable, that any error will be corrected, or that the site or any signal it carries will produce any particular result or outcome. Some of our data comes from third-party sources we do not control; we are not responsible for those sources' accuracy or availability. Any reliance you place on the site is strictly at your own risk.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, in no event shall Wendell Labs LLC, its officers, directors, employees, or affiliates be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages — including lost profits, lost data, lost trading opportunities, or losses from any investment decision — arising from or related to your use of Standard Poorly. Our total aggregate liability for any claim arising from these terms or your use of the site shall not exceed the greater of (a) $100 USD or (b) the amount you paid us in the 12 months preceding the claim.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, you agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Wendell Labs LLC and its officers, directors, employees, contractors, and affiliates from and against any and all claims, liabilities, damages, losses, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or related to: (i) your use of or access to Standard Poorly; (ii) your violation of these terms; (iii) your violation of any law or of the rights of any third party; and (iv) any trading, investment, or other decision you make based on anything you read on, or obtained from, Standard Poorly. We reserve the right, at our own expense, to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter otherwise subject to indemnification by you, in which case you agree to cooperate with our defense.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Missouri, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles.

Mandatory arbitration: Any dispute arising from or related to these terms or your use of Standard Poorly shall be resolved by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, in St. Louis County, Missouri. You and Standard Poorly each waive the right to a jury trial and the right to participate in a class action. You may opt out of this arbitration provision by emailing legal@standardpoorly.com within 30 days of first using the site, with subject line “Arbitration Opt-Out” — no consequence to your use of the site.

Small claims court remains an option for individual disputes within its jurisdictional limits.

If any part of these terms is found unenforceable by a court of competent jurisdiction, the rest remains in effect. Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.

We may revise these terms. Material changes will be announced with a banner at the top of the site for at least 14 days plus a note in the next newsletter. The “effective” date at the top of this page is canonical. Continued use of the site after a material change constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.

Legal questions, DMCA notices, arbitration opt-outs, sponsorship-bias complaints: legal@standardpoorly.com. General inquiries: hello@standardpoorly.com.