Where the data comes from
Written for the person who has to sign this off. Every source SigmaLens reads, what we take from it, and whether it could be taken away. Where something needs a written confirmation we do not yet hold, it says so rather than being left off the page.
| Source | What we take | Standing | Could it stop? |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEC EDGARsec.gov | 8-K filings per holding (item codes and the attached press release), and 13F institutional positions. | US Government work
Public domain. Published for exactly this
use. |
No. We read the same public filings anyone may read, within SEC's fair-access rules - identifying User-Agent, rate limited. There is no account to revoke. |
| OFACtreasury.gov | Sanctions actions and designations as published. | US Government work
Public domain. |
No, for the same reason. |
| US Treasuryhome.treasury.gov | Daily par yield curve rates. | US Government work | No. |
| FREDSt. Louis Fed | Macro series (inflation, growth, labour, policy) used for the regime read. | Free, attribution
A small number of series carry
restrictions from the body that originally published them; we use
headline federal series. |
Unlikely. Public API, no exclusivity. |
| GDELTgdeltproject.org | The 15-minute event and knowledge-graph files. We read the published extract, not the underlying articles. | Cleared for commercial use
Openly published, free to download, and
confirmed as permitting commercial redistribution. This was the
one open question on the news layer and it is closed. |
No. We read the published extract rather than the articles behind it, so nothing here depends on a publisher's terms. |
| SEC company referenceEDGAR submissions | Who a listed company is: name, CIK, the SEC's own SIC classification and the country of its registered address. This is what maps a holding to an exposure. | Public domain
A US government work. Free to
redistribute in a commercial product, with no contract to
negotiate and nothing to renew. |
No. It ships as a file inside the product and is rebuilt deliberately, so nothing about it can change under a page load. |
| Market dataprices, and profiles outside EDGAR | Closing prices for the validation work, fund holdings for look-through, and identity for the symbols the SEC file does not list. | Not licensed for commercial use today
Currently served by an unofficial Yahoo
Finance client, which is fine for development and is
not a basis for a paid product. |
Yes - and we assume it will. It is no longer load-bearing for exposure mapping. See below. |
What has changed is how much rests on it. Company identity, which is what decides whether news can reach a position at all, now resolves from the SEC reference file above: a public-domain dataset that ships with the product and is read from disk. We moved it because the old arrangement failed in a way worth describing. On a 500-position book, three identical runs minutes apart left 6.2%, 45.0% and 99.0% of the holdings unresolved. The vendor was rate-limiting; a throttled lookup produced a holding with no exposures; and a holding with no exposures was rendered as a position nothing had happened to. A third party being busy was reaching the screen as a claim about the customer's book.
The vendor still answers for prices, for fund holdings, and for symbols outside the SEC's registrant list. Where it cannot answer, the product now says which holdings it could not check and why, rather than showing them as calm. The licensed replacement remains an interface with a per-account entitlement behind it, so switching is a contract and a configuration change rather than an engineering project.
What that means for a fund
The objection we expect, answered directly: what happens if a publisher blocks us?
We do not scrape publishers
The news layer reads GDELT's own published extract. We never fetch articles from a newspaper's site, so there is no publisher relationship to lose and no paywall to be accused of circumventing.
The core is government filings
Corporate events come from the companies' own SEC filings. That is a statutory disclosure channel: it cannot be withdrawn from us specifically, and it is the same source a fund's own analysts use.
Nothing is redistributed raw
We publish scores, the reasoning behind them, and a link back to the original. We do not republish source datasets, which is the activity most licences restrict.
Coverage is stated, not implied
SEC filings cover US registrants only. Holdings we cannot see are labelled as such in the product rather than shown as a calm zero.
Handling and retention
What we hold about a client
An email address, a password hash (PBKDF2), and the list of tickers and weights they enter. No trades, no positions in currency terms unless the client chooses to import values, no personal data beyond the login.
Where it goes
Nowhere. Holdings are not sent to any third party. Market-data lookups are per ticker, and a ticker is not a client identity.
Deletion
Account deletion removes the account and its data from the live database in the same action, from the client's own settings page.
Availability
/readyz returns 503 the moment any feed passes its
staleness tolerance, so an outage is detectable by an external monitor
rather than discovered by a reader.
Questions this page does not answer - entity, insurance, contractual terms, and the securities-law posture - are being handled with counsel and are not represented as settled here. How the score is built and validated →