Market Memos · Where To Look
Sentiment Reads
Has anyone started paying attention to this company yet — and how much should you believe them?
Screens tell you money is already moving. They cannot tell you whether people are moving — earlier, in places no screen reaches. This page is about that, and about not getting fleeced while looking for it.
One question weighs every source: what does it cost them to be wrong? Filed transactions cost a lot, so they carry the most weight — those are on Money Flows. This page covers the two tiers below that.
Tier 2 — behaviour, not opinion. Search volume, app downloads, job postings. Nobody in the data is discussing a stock, so nobody is trying to move one.
Tier 3 — people talking. Message boards, Reddit, X. The earliest signal available and the least verified.
The working rule: Tier 3 finds it, Tier 1 or 2 confirms it, never the reverse. A name that surfaces on a message board and then shows insider buying is interesting. A name with insider buying that you then go hunting for enthusiasm about is you talking yourself into something.
Tier 2 — behaviour, not opinion
The least contaminated tier, because nobody in it is talking about a stock.
What people are searching for
Quiver's Google Trends page is free and does the thing you actually want: a ranked table of public companies by change in Google search interest, with a trend score based on month-over-month change and a history page per ticker. Month-over-month is the right window — slow enough to ignore one news day, fast enough to catch something building. Scan the top for a small name you don't recognise with no news attached.
Then use Google Trends directly on that name — and search the product or brand, not the ticker. Almost nobody googles a ticker symbol, so ticker searches measure investor attention rather than customer demand, which is a weaker and different thing. Five-year window so a seasonal bump doesn't read as a breakout, and always compare against a named competitor: relative share of search is the real measure.
The rest of it
- App store rank within category, tracked over weeks — a demand curve nobody is editorialising about.
- Job postings on the company's own careers page. Fifteen new salespeople means an internal forecast was made. Headcount moves before revenue.
- Review counts, not scores — Amazon, Google, G2. The number accumulating per month is a usage proxy. The score is opinion; the count is traffic.
Tier 2 is the only tier that can be genuinely early, because it measures the thing itself rather than commentary about it. It is also slow, which is why it confirms rather than triggers.
Tier 3 — people talking
This tier is not worthless — it is unverified, which is a different thing. It is the earliest of the three and the only one that can tell you a story is forming before any of it reaches a filing. Read it for what is being said and why, never as a vote count.
The most useful of the three Tier 3 venues, because it is the only one with visible moderation, threaded argument, and people posting actual work that others can pick apart.
| Subreddit | What it is |
|---|---|
| r/pennystocks ~2.3M | The main microcap room. Moderators banned all promotion after promoters flooded in — which is why it's readable, and why they now arrive disguised as enthusiastic members. |
| r/smallstreetbets ~523K | Smaller and more small-cap focused. Better signal-to-noise than its parent. |
| r/UndervaluedStonks ~20K | Tiny and value-oriented. Higher average post quality precisely because it is small. |
| r/biotech_stocks ~31K | Regulars often know the trial calendars better than the analysts covering the space. |
| r/wallstreetbets ~20M | Too big to be early. By the time a small name breaks through here, you are late. |
Read the comments, not the post. Anybody can write a bullish thesis. What matters is whether the room can find holes in it — an unanswered objection in the replies is worth more than the whole original argument.
Check the poster's history. An account that has posted about one ticker for two weeks and nothing else is not an investor. And value the post that names its own risk: anyone who tells you what would make them wrong has done work.
ApeWisdom tracks mention counts and 24-hour change across these subs, free, updated twice hourly. The 24-hour change column is the only one that matters — absolute mentions just rediscover the mega-caps every day. It counts tickers written with a dollar sign, so plain-text mentions are missed, and it shows no "last updated" timestamp, which means a stalled scraper looks identical to a quiet day.
StockTwits
StockTwits' trending page is free — Trending, Most Active, Watchers, Gainers and Losers, refreshed every five minutes. The sentiment data itself now sits behind the paid Edge tier.
Which matters less than it sounds. The bull/bear ratio was never worth much: self-reported tags from a self-selecting crowd, so it reads bullish on nearly everything — a popularity contest, not a measurement. Use the free watcher count and message volume against that ticker's own baseline instead. A watcher count climbing on a name with no news is the real tell, and it costs nothing.
Long-form
Different from the rest of Tier 3 — these are arguments, not chatter, and on a small company a single good write-up can be the only real research that exists anywhere.
On Seeking Alpha, follow the ticker rather than an author; following a symbol delivers new articles by email, which is the whole mechanism, because the front page is dominated by mega-caps. And read the disclosure line: in 2017 the SEC charged 27 people and firms over bullish articles published on research sites without disclosing the writers were paid by the companies.
Substack has no way to track a ticker, and that is structural — no index, no symbol pages, every newsletter its own island. So the unit is the writer. When a good small-cap piece turns up, check whether that person writes regularly and subscribe. Five good writers beat a search tool that doesn't exist.
TradingView
On TradingView, Ideas is genuine sentiment: published charts tagged long or short, with reasoning and replies. A few appearing on a quiet small cap is the same tell as rising message volume.
The Strong Buy / Sell gauge is not sentiment. It is arithmetic on moving averages — no human opinion in it. Nor are the "sentiment" indicators in the script library, which are user-written formulas over price and volume. Read the Ideas tab and ignore the gauges.
Not worth the time
Quora has no ticker pages, so a company cannot be watched, and answers surface by vote rather than recency. Telegram and Discord trading channels are frequently paid promotion end to end — treat anything found there as a list of names to investigate elsewhere.
Spotting a promotion
The SEC's red flags for microcap promotion: promotional activity exceeding the company's actual product marketing; guaranteed returns; pressure to buy now; press releases announcing events that never materialise; heavy share issuance with no matching growth in assets; frequent changes of company name or business.
Paid promoters must legally disclose their compensation, and many do — in small print at the bottom. Reading the disclaimer is the fastest way to identify one.
The practical tell: chatter rising with no cause anyone can name. Nothing filed, nothing announced — but suddenly forty posts.
The protection is written exits, decided before entry. Sentiment gets you in early. It will never get you out.
Half an hour a week
- Start from a list you already have — a screen, a watchlist, your positions. Not a message board.
- Insider cluster buys, last week. Cross-check against that list. Overlap is the best free confirmation available.
- ApeWisdom 24h change and StockTwits watcher counts on those names only.
- Scan the Google Trends table for a small name near the top you don't recognise.
- Anything lighting up twice gets three checks: an 8-K Item 5.02 for a management change, a Form 4 for insider buying, and EDGAR for a shelf registration.
The filings behind steps 2 and 5 are covered on Money Flows. Biotech runs on a different clock entirely — see Biotech Catalysts. And for what actually makes one of these names pay off: The Ten-Bagger Arithmetic.
