Every 15 minutes we read public community feeds with our own eyes — subreddits like r/wallstreetbets and r/shortsqueeze, plus 4chan's /biz/ board. Raw posts, not somebody else's digest. Our own symbol recognition maps chatter to real listed tickers, throws out trader slang and false hits, and reads the mood of the crowd.
Every scan goes into our own 15-minute history. No ticker is judged on a raw count — it's judged against its own past. How hard are mentions accelerating? How far is it climbing our board? How suddenly did it appear from nothing? That signature is the difference between permanent noise and an actual launch.
Around 80% of the signal comes from forums where meme-stocks live. The other 20% we pull wider — Stocktwits, Yahoo trends and the financial press. That's how we catch the moment a forum secret turns into a headline.
A spike on one platform is usually noise. The same name igniting on three independent surfaces at once almost never is. Confirmation earns extra points. And every rap sheet puts hard market data next to the chatter — price, volume, float, short interest — so hype meets the ground in a single view.
We don't republish anyone else's datasets, and no third-party feed is ever our primary count — aggregated trends are confirmation at most. We read public pages only, at a polite pace, never behind a login. The exact weights and thresholds behind the threat level stay with us. That's the recipe, not the ingredient list.