What we publish, and what we refuse to.
TheTickerDaily covers a fixed list of US mega-caps with one editorial rule: every lead is tied to a named catalyst — a specific SEC filing, earnings release, macro print, or analyst rating change. No sentiment frames. No vibes coverage. The page you're reading explains how that gate works in practice.
1. The covered list
We track 30 US mega-caps daily. The list is deliberately small so each name gets real attention: AAPL, MSFT, GOOGL, AMZN, NVDA, META, TSLA, BRK-B, AVGO, LLY, JPM, V, WMT, MA, UNH, PG, JNJ, HD, XOM, ORCL, AMD, PLTR, COIN, NFLX, ADBE, CRM, QCOM, INTC. See the full list and each name's last activity →
Every weekday after US market close (22:30 UTC), our nightly sweep pulls four streams of evidence per ticker: yfinance news (24–72h window), SEC EDGAR filings (8-K, 10-Q, 10-K, Form 4), analyst rating changes (upgrades, downgrades — not reaffirmations), and Reddit thread signals (r/stocks, r/investing, gated to ≥2,000 upvotes).
2. The substance gate
Most aggregators surface anything that moved. We don't. A trigger has to clear a gate before it becomes a story:
- Small move (under 5%) — passes the gate. Sympathy moves and routine drift are fine to mention; they're often the most informative.
- Big move (5% or more) — requires at least one named catalyst within the last 72 hours: a specific earnings result, a dateable analyst action, a product news event, an SEC filing.
- Big move with no named catalyst — rejected. The skip is logged with the reason. We don't speculate when there's nothing to anchor to.
3. Reading article bodies (not just headlines)
For every news headline that comes through the wire for a covered name, we fetch the actual article body, strip HTML, and run a substance check: does this contain original reporting, or is it a recap of yesterday's news with a fresh headline? Most aggregator content fails. Today's issue dropped several articles for this reason.
The same applies to SEC filings. An 8-K hitting today doesn't mean the underlying event is fresh — Form 4 insider transactions are routinely disclosed 24–72 hours after the actual sale. We extract the event date and demote anything where the event is more than 36 hours old, even if the filing itself is from today. Readers care when the thing happened, not when SEC received the paperwork.
4. Anti-repetition memory
Before we draft a new piece on a covered name, we fetch the last three pieces we've published on that ticker and feed them into the planning step with one instruction: find a structurally new angle, or skip. If the only available angle is a restatement of what we already said, we skip and log the reason.
5. Editorial transparency — the refused list
Every issue we publish includes the inverse of the lead slate: what we examined and chose not to cover. Routine corporate housekeeping (annual meeting filings, director re-elections), stale events disclosed late, articles with no original substance, and quiet tickers that produced nothing worth saying. We surface this so you can audit our gate.
This is the part that makes a generic "what's moving today" hard to replicate. The refused log is the by-product of nine months of editorial decisions, and we make it visible. Most outlets show you what they covered. We show you what they would have if rigor weren't a constraint.
6. What you can do here
- Read today's brief — the slate that cleared the gate, plus today's filings desk and refused list.
- Browse the covered list — every mega-cap with its most recent catalyst snapshot.
- Read prior issues — full archive of daily recaps with titles, summaries, and Leonardo cover art.
- Subscribe on Substack — get tomorrow's issue in your inbox.
Get tomorrow's issue.
The daily lands in your inbox most weekdays — short when the market's quiet, long when something material happens. The same substance gate, the same refused list, in your inbox.