Methodology

01

Reading a Wire story

Every figure in a story comes from stored data or an official document, and the story names its source. A price is the price of a named market, such as BTC/USDT on Binance, not a global average. Times are in UTC unless a local exchange time is named, such as “16:00 New York time”; Turkish stories give Turkey time (TSİ).

A percentage is the change against the reference the story names: the price a set time earlier, the previous session's close, or the close of the previous week or month.

A story written by AI ends with one sentence that says so, after its sources; the editorial policy explains how AI is used and checked. The thresholds on this page are starting values; when we change one, this page changes with it.

02

How an article is built

An article has a headline, a standfirst of one or two sentences and several short sections under subheadings, from about 250 to 1,000 words depending on the kind of story. The sections follow a fixed order for each kind: for a large Bitcoin move, for example, the move itself, its price context, records, derivatives, the wider market and the calendar.

Before anything is written, software collects the story's facts from our data and official sources: price changes over one hour, four hours, 24 hours, seven days, 30 days and since 1 January; the distance from the highest price in our data; the largest 24-hour move since a date; trading volume against its 30-day average; liquidations by side and exchange; funding rates and open interest; the moves of other large coins; our estimate of the total value of the crypto market; the trading sessions that are open; and the next scheduled US data releases and Fed meetings.

Software computes every derived figure, such as a difference or the distance from a high; the AI model only puts the computed figures into words. A section whose data is missing is left out. Long/short ratios, ETF flows, on-chain data and analysts' forecasts are not in our data, so stories never report them. Records name the month our data begins, and a price is called an all-time high only when we hold the full history.

Each article is checked sentence by sentence against the facts before it can be published. When an article fails, the story is published with its template text instead: shorter fixed sentences filled with the same figures. The calendar section lists only scheduled events with their dates and times, such as a US inflation release or a Fed decision, and says nothing about what they will do to markets.

03

What a close means

A close is the last value of a trading session. Depending on the market, it is one of these:

• Official closes. US stocks and the DAX, FTSE 100, IBEX 35, BEL 20, STI, VIX and US Dollar Index: the daily bar from iTick, read after the session ends.
• Index contracts. NAS100, SPX500, US30, JP225 and HK50 are perpetual contracts that track the Nasdaq-100, the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Nikkei 225 and the Hang Seng Index. Their prices come from contract trades recorded in AlertaChart's own database. They trade almost around the clock and are priced in USDT, so their level can differ from the index's official close. We report the contract's level when the cash market closes: the close of the one-minute bar that ends at the closing time. A story says that the contract “ends the session” at a level, never that the index closed there.
• Commodity contracts. Gold (XAU/USDT), silver (XAG/USDT), WTI crude (USOIL), Brent crude (UKOIL), natural gas and copper are perpetual contracts whose trades are recorded in AlertaChart's own database; their daily value is taken at 17:00 New York time.
• Currencies. EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY, AUD/USD, USD/CHF, USD/CAD, NZD/USD, USD/TRY and EUR/TRY: the rate at 17:00 New York time, the usual end of the forex day, taken from the five-minute bar that ends at 17:00 (iTick data).
• Crypto. The daily close of Bitcoin and Ethereum is the 23:59 UTC one-minute bar on Binance spot; a week ends on Sunday at 23:59 UTC and a month on its last day at 23:59 UTC.

Closes of stocks, indices, index contracts, currencies and commodities are written once into AlertaChart's own record of closes, with their source. Records and streaks are computed from that record, which is why a story may say “in AlertaChart's data since …”.

04

Sessions, holidays and half days

Close stories follow each exchange's trading day. Local closing times:

We use each exchange's published calendar of holidays and half days. No close is reported for a day the market was closed, and none for a date outside the calendars we hold. Currencies have no close on 25 December and 1 January. Commodity contracts have no close on New Year's Day, Good Friday and Christmas Day, nor on US stock market holidays.

Index contracts keep trading when the cash market is shut, so we also check that the market itself traded: the US contracts are reported only when at least 80% of the US stocks we follow traded in that session; HK50 is checked against the Hong Kong calendar and, where that data is available, against trading in large Hong Kong stocks; JP225 against the Tokyo calendar; commodity contracts only on CME trading days and when the same contract on Binance also traded at the close.

05

Checks before a figure is used

• Two reads. A close is final only when two reads a few minutes apart give the same value: 3 and 8 minutes after the close for contracts in our own database; for iTick data from 15 minutes after the close (30 minutes for US stocks, after the closing auction), with the second read at least 5 minutes after the first. A close that is not confirmed within 2 hours is not published automatically.
• No skipped sessions. The previous close must belong to the previous trading day; otherwise the story gives no day-on-day change.
• A cross-check. Gold, silver, oil, natural gas and copper contract prices are compared with the same contracts on Binance, also recorded in our database; a difference of more than 0.3% means no close is published for that day until the values agree.
• Plausible size. A daily change larger than 15% for an index, 25% for a commodity, 10% for a currency or 60% for a stock holds the story back, and a US stock change of 25% or more is checked against the stock split calendar.
• Fresh data. During a session, moves are checked only on fresh prices: iTick bars at most 10 minutes old and contract prices at most 3 minutes old. A crypto record is checked again against the latest one-minute bars before it is written.
• Later reads. If a later read of a close differs at the precision we print, the difference is flagged and the story is corrected if needed.

06

The 15-minute delay of US prices

Stories about intraday moves and opening gaps of US stocks and of the official indices from iTick (DAX, FTSE 100, IBEX 35, BEL 20 and STI) are published at least 15 minutes after the time of the price they report. The story prints that time, and its chart stops there. Currency stories and index and commodity contract stories are not delayed. Close stories are written from final values read 15 minutes or more after the close.

07

Crypto price moves

Crypto prices are Binance spot prices of USDT pairs, or of the USDT-margined perpetual contract when a coin has no spot pair. We watch three windows. A story runs when a move, up or down, crosses one of these thresholds:

The last row covers pairs that trade at least $20 million a day and have been listed for at least 30 days; stablecoins and leveraged tokens are never included. Each threshold is reported once per direction. After a story, only a larger move in the same direction is news for 6 hours, and two stories about one coin are at least 15 minutes apart; later moves of the same coin on the same UTC day update its story. A move that fades below half of the first threshold starts over. When 5 or more of the large coins move the same way within 15 minutes, we report Bitcoin, Ethereum and the 3 largest moves and leave out the rest.

08

Stock, index, currency and commodity moves

During a session, a move is measured against the previous session's close (for currencies and commodities, the value at 17:00 New York time the day before). A story runs at these thresholds, up or down:

Moves are checked only while the market is open: US stocks every 5 minutes from 09:45 New York time to the close, US index contracts during the New York session, JP225 and HK50 during the Tokyo and Hong Kong sessions, currencies from Sunday 17:00 to Friday 17:00 New York time, and commodities in CME trading hours, except on US stock market holidays. Each threshold is reported once per direction per session, and stories about one market are at least 30 minutes apart; after a story, only a larger move the same way is news for the rest of the session. The first check of a session never produces a story. When 8 or more US stocks cross a threshold in the same direction within 15 minutes, we report the index contracts and the 3 largest stock moves.

Opening gaps: a US stock that opens at least 4% (the 10 largest companies) or 6% (other stocks) away from its previous close, measured on the first five-minute bar at 09:40 New York time; the DAX, FTSE 100, IBEX 35, BEL 20 and STI when their first bar, 10 minutes after the open, is at least 1% away from the previous close. Contracts that trade through the night have no opening gap.

09

When a close gets its own story

Routine closes appear in the region wraps and in the daily market wrap (see Daily wraps). A close gets its own story only when it says something a wrap cannot:

• indices, index contracts and commodity contracts: a record, meaning the highest or lowest close in our data, the highest or lowest in at least a year, or a 52-week high or low;
• US stocks: a change of at least 5% from the previous close (3.5% for the 10 largest companies), or a record;
• currencies: a change of at least 0.8% (1% for USD/JPY, USD/TRY and EUR/TRY), or a record;
• Bitcoin and Ethereum: no daily close story; the daily crypto wrap reports their closes.

Weekly and monthly changes appear in the Friday and month-end wraps. A separate weekly or monthly story runs only for a record, such as the best week since a date, or for a large change: indices and index contracts 2.5% in a week or 5% in a month; stocks 10% in a week or 20% in a month; currencies 2% in a week or 4% in a month; gold 4% in a week or 8% in a month; oil 8% in a week or 15% in a month. Bitcoin and Ethereum share one weekly and one monthly close story.

10

Records and streaks

• Highest (or lowest) close since a date. The most recent earlier close at or above (at or below) the new one is at least 60 sessions back. The story names that date.
• Highest (or lowest) close in AlertaChart's data. No earlier close in our record is higher (lower), and the record covers at least 365 days. The story says when our data begins; it says “all-time” only when we hold the full history.
• 52-week high (or low). Above (below) every close of the previous 364 days.
• Streak. At least 5 higher (or lower) closes in a row that make the longest such run since a date at least 90 days back.
• First close above a level. The first close above a round level (each whole lira for USD/TRY and EUR/TRY, each $100 for gold) in at least 5 years of our data.
• Crypto records. For Bitcoin, Ethereum and the 20 largest other coins: a price more than 0.05% above the highest price in AlertaChart's Binance record of the pair, when that record covers at least 365 days. It is a Binance record, not a global one, and stories say so. A second record the same day needs a further rise of 2% and 6 hours; there are at most 2 records a day per coin. A 52-week high or low needs the previous extreme to be at least 30 days old and is reported at most once every 7 days per coin and side.

11

Liquidations

Liquidation figures come from Binance's public stream of forced liquidations on USDT-margined futures; articles about Bitcoin and Ethereum also give the Bybit and OKX liquidations recorded by AlertaChart, and every total names the exchanges it covers. Binance publishes at most one liquidation per contract per second, so every total is a minimum and headlines say “at least”. A period in which the stream was interrupted produces no story.

Single-coin stories have higher tiers at 2 and 4 times the minimum. The same market-wide tier is reported at most once every 3 hours, and the same tier of one coin at most once every 2 hours.

12

Funding rates and open interest

Funding: for Bitcoin and Ethereum we weight the predicted funding rates of Binance, Bybit and OKX by each exchange's open interest, using at least 2 exchanges. A story runs when the weighted rate changes sign and stays on the new side for 3 five-minute readings in a row, at a size of at least 0.003% per eight hours; at most once a day in each direction.

Open interest: the total of Binance, Bybit and OKX for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, BNB, Cardano, Chainlink, Avalanche, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and Sui, counted in coins rather than dollars, so that a price move alone never looks like new positions.

Each threshold is reported once per direction per UTC day.

13

Company filings (SEC Form 8-K)

We follow the Form 8-K current reports that companies in the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100, and listed companies that hold bitcoin, file on SEC EDGAR. Most 8-K filings are routine, so we report only these items, and only when the filing's documents show news:

• results of operations (Item 2.02): the company's results announcement;
• material agreements (Item 1.01): only when the press release describes a merger, an acquisition, a sale, a licence or a collaboration, not a loan, credit or note agreement;
• completed acquisitions or disposals (Item 2.01), with a press release;
• a new or departing chief executive, chief financial officer, president, chief operating officer or chair (Item 5.02);
• bankruptcy or receivership (Item 1.03);
• dividends, share buybacks, mergers and acquisitions announced under Items 7.01 and 8.01;
• purchases or sales of bitcoin or other digital assets that listed companies announce under Items 7.01 and 8.01.

Amended filings, pay arrangements, financing agreements and annual meeting votes are not reported. An AI model first judges whether the filing contains news; the story is then written by AI from the press release filed with the report (Exhibit 99.1), and every figure in it must be quoted from the filing. A filing story is published only when that text passes every check, within 24 hours of the filing, and it links the filing on EDGAR. On days with at least three results filings, a roundup links the day's results stories.

14

Fed decisions and US economic data

Federal Reserve: we report each decision of the Federal Open Market Committee on the federal funds target range from the Fed's statement, with the change in basis points. After the March, June and September meetings the story adds the committee's median projection of the rate for the current year. Articles also describe which sentences of the statement changed from the previous meeting's; quotes come only from the two statements.

US economic data: we report consumer prices (CPI, Bureau of Labor Statistics), personal consumption expenditures prices (PCE, Bureau of Economic Analysis), payrolls and the unemployment rate (Bureau of Labor Statistics), job openings (JOLTS, Bureau of Labor Statistics), retail sales (Census Bureau) and gross domestic product (Bureau of Economic Analysis), read through FRED after each release. Annual rates are computed from the index as the agency does and rounded to one decimal; GDP is reported as the change from a year earlier. A revision of a period already reported is not published again.

Previews: the day before a scheduled CPI, jobs, PCE or GDP release or a Fed decision, a preview gives the release time, the previous readings and how Bitcoin, the NAS100 contract and gold moved on earlier release days. Previews contain no forecasts and no consensus figures.

An article about a release can show how Bitcoin, the NAS100 and gold contracts and EUR/USD moved from five minutes before to 30 minutes after the release time. These are price changes over a stated window; stories never say that the data caused them.

15

New listings

A new listing is a crypto exchange's announcement of a new spot market, from exchanges such as Binance, Upbit, Bybit and OKX. We report it only when the announcement is recent and on the exchange's own website, and when the market is confirmed as new. Futures launches and delistings are not reported.

16

Daily wraps

• Crypto, after each UTC day: the closes of Bitcoin and Ethereum on Binance, the largest gainer and loser among the 100 most traded USDT pairs, the day's futures liquidations when the stream was complete, funding rates, and our estimate of the total value of the crypto market.
• Europe, after each Frankfurt trading day: the DAX, FTSE 100, IBEX 35 and BEL 20 closes.
• Asia, after each Tokyo trading day: JP225, HK50 and the STI.
• Markets at the US close, 40 minutes after the New York close on each US trading day: the US index contracts and the VIX, the 3 largest gainers and losers among the US stocks we follow, the European and Asian closes, EUR/USD, USD/JPY and USD/TRY at the time of writing, gold, silver and oil at 16:00 New York time, and Bitcoin and Ethereum over 24 hours.
• Weeks and months, after the last trading day of a week or month: a longer overview of crypto, and of markets at the US close, with the period's changes and records.

Wraps are written by AI as articles when their data is complete; a wrap with missing data gets the template text and is never translated.

17

Daily movers

Every day at 11:00 New York time, one story names the largest rise and the largest fall among crypto coins; on US trading days, a second story does the same for US stocks. The check runs until 11:30 New York time; a story that cannot be written by then is skipped for the day.

Crypto. The coins we follow for price moves, ranked by the 24-hour change of their Binance spot USDT pair. Stablecoins, leveraged tokens, tokenised stocks and funds, gold tokens, and wrapped and staked coins are left out, and so is a coin whose price at the check is outside its 24-hour range.

US stocks. On New York Stock Exchange trading days, half days included: the companies in the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100 that we follow, each against its previous session's close. A stock with a split in the three days before is left out, and so is one without a previous close; an unusually large move is held back as possibly wrong data. As with other US stock moves, the story is published at least 15 minutes after the time of the prices it reports.

When no coin or stock fell by 0.1% or more, the story names the two largest rises instead, and the other way round; it never presents a coin or stock that did not fall as a faller. The stories give prices and changes from our data and may link other Wire stories about the same coin or company as facts, never as the reason for a move.

18

Stories in other languages

These stories are translated from English into the Wire's 20 other languages: the daily crypto wrap; large moves and records of Bitcoin and Ethereum; market-wide liquidation waves; Fed decisions and US inflation and jobs data; and the weekly and monthly crypto wraps. The US close wrap and the results of the 10 largest US companies are also translated into German and Japanese. Other stories are translated only on some days, and stories with template text alone are never translated.

Each translation is made and checked per story and language: an AI model translates the English article; software checks every number, name, date and time in that language; a second model translates the text back into English without seeing the original; and three separate AI reviewers check meaning and numbers, language and search terms, and compliance with our standards. A translation that a reviewer flags is fixed once and checked again. A translation that still fails is not published in that language.

Numbers follow each language's own format and size words. Dates follow the language's usual calendar: Thai pages give Buddhist-era years and Persian pages the Persian calendar. Times stay in UTC. Each language publishes at most 15 new stories a day.

A translated page states its own price times. When the English story is updated, the translation shows the update note in its own language until the changed sections have been translated and checked; when the story is corrected, its translations are taken down until they have been translated and checked again.

19

Updates to a story

A stock, index, currency or commodity gets at most one page per trading session, and a coin at most one page per UTC day. A later event, such as a larger move in the same direction, the close, a record or a liquidation wave, updates that page instead of opening a new one, and the page lists each update with its time. A page is updated at most 4 times; smaller moves, fades and reversals do not change it. After a large change, up to two updates may rewrite the article's changed sections with AI; later updates change only the template sentences.

How corrections are made is set out in the editorial policy.

20

How many stories

The Wire publishes at most 100 new stories a day, with daily limits for each kind of story and for each market, so that one busy market does not crowd out the rest. Updates to a story do not count as new stories.

21

Trademarks

Nasdaq-100, S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, Nikkei 225, Hang Seng Index, DAX, FTSE 100, IBEX 35, BEL 20, STI, VIX, US Dollar Index and the other index names used on the Wire belong to their owners. Neither the index owners nor the exchanges whose prices we record endorse AlertaChart. Contract prices are trades in contracts that track an index, recorded in AlertaChart's own database; they are not index values.

Market information, not investment advice.