How it works

1. 1

   A disclosure is filed

   Someone paid to promote a stock discloses it, as Section 17(b) requires, naming the ticker, the compensation, and who paid. That disclosure is published alongside the promotion.

2. 2

   We parse who paid whom

   We read the disclosure from our tracked newsletters and promotion sites, extract the ticker, funder, amount, and promotion window, and collapse the many newsletter copies of one campaign into a single deal.

3. 3

   Subscribers are alerted

   Once a disclosure clears that parsing step, it goes out to anyone subscribed (the ticker, who paid, and how much) by SMS, email, or Telegram, as the promotion opens. Alert delivery is part of Pro, which also shows the same promos live on the board; without a plan they open up once they have ended.

4. 4

   Price and PnL are tracked

   We anchor the deal to the market price at its window start and measure what happened next (the peak, the fade, and whether the move held) from public price data.

The precise definitions behind every figure (dedupe keys, PnL anchors, grade inputs) are on the methodology page.

No. A paid promotion that discloses its compensation under Section 17(b) of the Securities Act is operating within the law, and that disclosure is precisely our data source. paidpromotracker reports what a promotion disclosed and what the price did afterward; it does not allege that any disclosed promotion is unlawful.

The regulators are clear, though, that disclosed compensation is itself a reason for caution: a disclosure “may not reveal that the underlying source of the compensation is a company insider,” and heavily promoted, thinly traded stocks are the classic setup for market manipulation. The SEC and FINRA investor alerts that make this case are linked from the methodology’s sources section.

The learn hub has longer guides on each piece of this:

• What is a paid stock promotion?
• How to tell if a stock is being paid to be promoted
• How to read a stock promotion disclaimer
• Section 17(b) of the Securities Act, explained for traders
• What happens to a stock after a paid promotion?

Every term the site uses, defined once. Each entry is deep-linkable (for example /how-it-works#fade). Market and regulatory terms (float, touting, reverse splits and the rest) are in the stock promotion glossary.

Promoter

The newsletter or website that published the paid promotion: the party that was compensated to promote the stock.

Operator

The party a disclosure names as having paid for the promotion (the “paid by”). Deals are grouped and graded by operator.

Funder

The upstream source of the promotion’s funding: an issuer or a third party. It is resolved beneath a deal rather than being part of its identity: the same promotion is often disclosed with the funder named on some newsletter rows and left blank on others, so keying deals on it would split one promotion into several.

Deal

One distinct promotion, after the many newsletter copies of the same campaign are deduped to a single ticker + promotion window. Every statistic is per deal.

Promotion window

The start-to-end period a promotion ran (or from its start through now, while it is still open). Price performance is measured across this window.

Disclosed amount vs. deal value

A single newsletter’s disclosed figure is the per-newsletter amount; the deal value is the whole-deal figure. We use the deal-level value so a campaign restated across newsletters counts its dollars once, not many times.

Peak

The highest intraday price reached over a deal’s own promotion window, measured from the anchor (called) price.

Hit rate

The share of an operator’s rated deals whose peak reached at least +10% above the called price. A deal that only ticked green is not a hit. The bar is a run a reader could plausibly have traded.

Fade

How much of the peak gave back by the window’s end (peak → window-end close). It is ≤ 0 by construction: the short-side read.

Days to peak

The number of trading days from the anchor to the peak.

Still elevated

Whether the window-end close is still above the anchor (called) price, meaning the promotion’s gain had not fully unwound.

Provisional grade

The state shown when an operator has too few deduped, rated deals for a letter grade. It reads “Provisional (n deals tracked)” instead of a letter.