Methodology

Where the data comes from

WhatsGoingOn (WGO) extracts structured trading theses from Reddit posts in r/wallstreetbets carrying the DD or YOLO flair. Each post is processed by Anthropic Claude Haiku, which identifies the ticker(s) under discussion, the author's directional view (bullish, neutral, or bearish), and a short summary of the argument. Posts that contain no actionable directional thesis — ranting, news links, screenshots without commentary — are filtered out.

How returns are measured

Returns are computed on the underlying ticker, not on the specific position the author described. We're measuring whether the directional call was right, not whether a particular options structure paid off. Performance is reported across seven windows (1 day, 3 days, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year), each anchored to the next trading day at or after the post's timestamp in America/New_York. A “win” for a bullish thesis is a positive return at the window; for a bearish thesis, a negative return. Neutral theses are excluded from win counts but still tracked for transparency.

Backfill and survivorship bias

Historical theses come from three Reddit listings: top-all-time, top-this-year, and the recent /new feed. Posts deleted by their authors or removed by moderators do not appear in these listings, so the historical dataset is biased toward posts that survived community scrutiny — classic survivorship bias. The day-zero live ingestion (post the moment it appears in /new) has a cleaner view, but anything older than the live window is filtered through this bias.

Authors whose Reddit accounts have since been deleted have their theses flagged with a deleted-account badge but remain in the dataset. This keeps the cohort honest: we don't silently drop the people who washed out.

Known limitations

  • The LLM occasionally misses positions in long, formatting-heavy posts. Cards display a confidence score; we hide thesis cards below 0.70 confidence by default.
  • Window returns use adj_close from yfinance. Days with no trade (delisted, halted) can leave a window unresolved; those theses show — in place of a number until the next valid close.
  • The ticker-page filter only considers theses posted within the last 1 year + 7 days. Older theses live on author pages but don't roll into ticker-level aggregate stats.

Informational only. Past performance does not predict future results. Not investment advice.