Data sources
- SEC EDGAR — 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K filings, XBRL financial data (margins, stock-based compensation, share count) and Form 4 insider transactions.
- Finnhub — the earnings calendar, consensus EPS and revenue estimates, and reported actuals.
- Yahoo Finance — daily and intraday price and volume bars, options chains, and FINRA short-interest figures.
- Unusual Whales — options-flow activity, implied-volatility history and historical implied moves around earnings.
- Company releases and earnings-call transcripts — used by the earnings grades and by research articles.
Third-party data is believed reliable but is not guaranteed; feeds are occasionally late, revised or missing. When an input is missing we leave the figure out rather than fill it in.
Sector money flow
Sector pages group stocks into 11 SPDR sectors and, below them, sub-industry baskets. A basket is built from the largest holdings of its reference ETF plus curated additions, and its flow is the equal-weighted average of its member stocks — so one mega-cap cannot drown out the rest. The reference ETF is a label, not an input.
Each stock's flow score runs from −100 to +100 and combines seven volume and price indicators over a 20-bar window: on-balance-volume slope, money-flow index, relative strength against SPY, accumulation/distribution, position versus VWAP, breadth, and dollar volume against its 20-day average. Confidence is the share of indicators that agree with the score's sign. If an indicator is unavailable, its weight is shared among the others.
Scores refresh every 30 minutes during the session (9:25–15:55 ET) with fuller runs at 12:00 and 16:05 ET. Intraday numbers are provisional; the 16:05 run, taken after closing prices settle, is the one sector pages and their member tables are built from.
Earnings grades (A–F)
An earnings grade scores the report, not the stock's reaction to it. It is a deterministic formula — no language model — computed from the company's release, consensus estimates and SEC XBRL data. It has six parts:
- Revenue and EPS against consensus (revenue carries most of the weight)
- Guidance — raised, maintained or cut, adjusted for the company's record against its own past guidance
- Profitability — gross and operating margin change, free cash flow against net income
- Operating signals from the release
- Rank against peers reporting in the same season
- Shareholder cost — stock-based compensation as a share of revenue and the change in share count
Missing parts are dropped, not scored as zero; if too little can be scored the quarter is shown as ungraded. Letters: A+ ≥ 90, A ≥ 80, B ≥ 65, C ≥ 50, D ≥ 35, otherwise F; a cut to full-year guidance caps the grade at C. Grades run at 20:30 ET on report days and again at 22:15 ET once peer and segment data arrive, so a grade can change on its first evening. For companies that report in a foreign currency, figures are converted to US dollars per US-listed share before grading.
Earnings calendar & expected move
The earnings desk covers companies worth $1 billion or more reporting in the next 12 trading days, from Finnhub's calendar, refreshed each evening. The expected move is the price of the at-the-money straddle for the first expiry after the report, divided by the share price. We only use a straddle with enough open interest and a tight enough bid-ask spread; otherwise we fall back to Unusual Whales' figure, and if neither is usable we show nothing. The expected move is the options market's estimate of size, not a forecast of direction, and it is not our prediction.
Stock data summaries
The summary on each stock page is generated from data by fixed rules, not written by a language model. It covers price trend (1-month to 1-year returns, 50- and 200-day averages from settled daily bars), the stock's sector basket and its rank inside it, past earnings reactions against the implied move, at-the-money implied volatility and its one-year rank, open-market insider buys and sells from Form 4 over the last 90 days, and short interest. A sentence is dropped when its data is missing.
Research articles
Research articles are drafted with the help of large language models working from primary material: SEC filings, earnings-call transcripts, insider filings, contracts and market data, with the day's news checked by web search. Drafts are never published automatically — an editor reviews each one first. Chinese is the original language for most articles; English versions are translated and then checked by machine for untranslated or mistranslated text before they go live. See About NextPick Research.
Known limits
- No claim of predictive edge. Our own testing of earnings-direction models has not found a reliable edge in predicting which way a stock moves after a report. We present data and context, not calls.
- Sector baskets use holdings fixed at a point in time and are equal-weighted, so they will not match the reference ETF's performance.
- Short interest is published about twice a month and can be up to three weeks old.
- Options-derived figures can be stale or blank for thinly traded names.
- Research articles reflect prices and facts on their publication date.
Nothing here is investment advice — see the disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.