Signals
market_signal aggregates Wire activity into contiguous daily or multi-day bars. Each bar carries wire-item attention and the net sentiment of entity mentions for one market scope.
| Operation | Role |
|---|---|
market_signal | Attention and net sentiment bars for one sector, country, or asset class |
When to use
Use market_signal when you need to:
- Track how much Wire coverage a market scope receives over time
- Measure the aggregate direction and magnitude of entity-mention sentiment
- Backtest attention and sentiment over a historical window
- Roll daily activity into coarser multi-day bars
Do not use when you need:
- The headlines behind a move →
list_wire - A company dossier or entity-specific sentiment →
retrieve_entity - Ticker-level impact narratives → developments and events
Use cases
Sector activity — Read the latest 14 bars of information-technology attention and net sentiment.
Code
Original energy coverage — Exclude syndication duplicates when measuring energy activity.
Code
Historical country signal — Backtest US coverage over an explicit system-time window.
Code
Weekly asset-class bars — Roll crypto activity into stable 7-day buckets.
Code
What you get back
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
bars | Oldest → newest; empty buckets are present, never omitted |
bar | Exclusive UTC bucket end |
count | Distinct Wire items about the scope |
sentiment | Net sum of every entity-mention sentiment on those items; 0 when empty or when no mentions exist |
sentiment_std | Population standard deviation across those mention sentiments; null when there are no mentions |
partial | true when the latest bucket is still in progress |
resolution | Bucket length used |
methodology_version | Signal definition version |
Floats are rounded to 2 decimal places. History is capped at 60 days; omitting start_timestamp returns the last 14 bars.
Scope values
value is a single string; the dimension is inferred:
| Kind | Examples |
|---|---|
| Sector | information_technology, energy, financials, health_care |
| Asset class | equities, fixed_income, currencies, commodities, crypto, real_estate |
| Country | Lowercase ISO alpha-2, such as us, cn, or gb |
novelty defaults to all four classes (new, update, duplicate, correction). Narrow it when you want originals/updates only.
Workflow
| User intent | Approach |
|---|---|
| “Is tech coverage increasing?” | Call with value: information_technology; read count over time |
| “What is the direction of energy sentiment?” | Call with value: energy; read the sign and magnitude of sentiment |
| “How has US attention changed?” | Call with value: us and an explicit window |
| “Show weekly crypto activity” | Call with value: crypto, resolution: 7d |
- Pick one scope
value(sector, country, or asset class). - Omit
start_timestampfor the latest 14 bars, or set an explicit historical window. - Read
countas coverage andsentimentas unnormalized net mention tone; usesentiment_stdto assess disagreement. - For narrative detail, follow up with Wire using the same scope filters.
Limitations
- One scope value per call — no multi-value baskets in a single request.
- Daily (or multi-day) bars only — no intraday resolution yet.
- Sentiment is an unnormalized net sum across entity mentions; magnitude rises with mention volume and should be compared primarily within the same scope over time.
countis Wire items, not entity mentions, so it cannot be used to derive average mention sentiment.- Country codes are free-form two-letter strings; invalid codes may return empty bars rather than a vocabulary error.
- Max lookback 60 days.
FAQ
Is sentiment an average? No. It is the net sum of entity-mention sentiments. Positive and negative mentions offset each other; larger absolute values reflect direction plus mention volume.
Why is sentiment 0 on a quiet day? Empty or mention-less bars use 0 for this sum-type statistic. Check count and sentiment_std for context.
What does bar mean? Exclusive bucket end in UTC. A 1d bar ending 2026-08-11T00:00:00Z covers [2026-08-10, 2026-08-11).
Can I pass a company name? No — use sectors, asset classes, or country codes. For a company, use Wire or retrieve_entity.
How do I backtest? Set start_timestamp / end_timestamp (system timestamps). end_timestamp: null means realtime.