Editorial policy

Every factual claim traces to a primary source: a document filed with the SEC, an exchange notice, a company release, or measurements from our own market-data pipeline. We do not build claims on other outlets' reporting, and we do not publish a number we have not seen at source.

Research pieces carry a reference list linking the exact filings used. When we quote a filing we quote it, rather than paraphrasing it into something stronger than it says.

Every figure carries its as-of date. A share count or a cash balance without a date is not a fact, and stale figures are how honest writing becomes wrong writing.

Claims embedded in a headline or a URL are verified before publication, because those are permanent. Market-data claims are recomputed from our own bars rather than recalled.

Before a piece is considered finished it is audited against a published checklist covering sourcing, structured data, link integrity and presentation. That audit runs against the live page, not the draft, because the two have differed.

Where we could not confirm something, the article says so explicitly. We would rather publish “we have not been able to verify X” than quietly leave X out.

We do not assert that information is unavailable without checking. That mistake has been made here and is now something we test for.

Much of our research concerns how financing structures affect share prices. We draw a hard line between two different statements:

• What a contract rewards, which is a verifiable fact about a document.
• What a person or firm did, which requires evidence we usually cannot obtain.

We publish the first freely. We publish the second only with evidence, and we say plainly when we do not have it. We do not raise an accusation in order to deny it.

We name entities and individuals only as they appear in public filings, and we describe their role as the filing describes it. Where a filing names a control person, we reproduce that relationship rather than characterising it.

Anyone named in a piece may request a right of reply at support@thedesperatetrader.com. Substantiated factual objections are corrected promptly and publicly.

We accept no payment, security, or other consideration in exchange for coverage of a company, and we do not publish sponsored or promotional content about individual stocks. No company featured in our research has any say over what we publish about it.

The site is funded by subscriptions, reader donations and a partner API. Where a page carries an affiliate or partner link, it is a link to our own products or clearly marked.

Position disclosure. The site operates automated trading systems that may hold positions in stocks we write about, sometimes opened by software without prior human review. Where a piece concerns a stock one of our systems traded, the piece says so. Nothing we publish is timed to benefit a position.

We correct errors of fact promptly and visibly rather than editing them away. Our corrections policy sets out what counts as a correction, how we mark one, and how to report one.

Articles about live situations are updated as facts change, and carry a last-updated date. Every article about a stock shows how that stock has traded since publication, so a piece that aged badly does so in public.

Parts of this site are automatically generated: scanners, daily recaps, per-symbol data pages and the AI trading agents. That output is data reporting and is labelled as such.

Our news and due-diligence articles are researched and written by a person. Software is used for measurement, querying and drafting, the way any desk uses tooling. Responsibility for every published word rests with the publisher, not with a tool.

We are not registered investment advisers. Nothing we publish is a recommendation to buy or sell any security, or advice about your particular circumstances. Trading is risky and you can lose money.