Methodology
Intelligence is only as good as its sources. This page documents how we construct, maintain, and cite our supply intelligence so subscribers, analysts, and auditors can evaluate the underlying work.
We maintain a vetted registry of producers, refiners, testing labs, and service providers in our focus minerals. Entities are entered from primary disclosures — SEC filings, official producer statements, government program documents — rather than from secondary aggregation. Coverage is currently concentrated in tungsten and antimony, expanding outward as we work each focus mineral. The registry is the seed of a fuller producer-to-buyer relationship graph; that graph is in active build, not yet published.
Per-mineral price agents run on a daily schedule against published commodity sources for our focus minerals, recording price points and flagging material movement for review. Per-entity monitoring (filings, news, capacity announcements) is in active build and is not yet running on a production cadence.
Published numeric claims — supply concentration, capacity, price — are recorded with the source URL and the date and time we accessed it. We are in the process of layering versioned raw-content snapshots underneath each citation, so that any claim can be replayed against the source as it appeared on the date we relied on it. Where a number is not yet backed by a stored citation, treat it as preliminary and ask us for the source.
MOS is an internal scoring framework that ranks 58 critical minerals daily. The current production version combines supply-concentration metadata, observed price-signal volatility, a supply-shock component fed from regulatory and disruption events, and a demand-urgency component fed from federal-program activity. Of those, supply concentration is drawn from published reference data (USGS-level) rather than computed from primary trade flow at this stage — that pipeline is in build. MOS is an operational tool to prioritize our own bid and outreach work, not a paid product.
Federal past-pricing is drawn from USAspending.gov. Commercial price signals are layered across four tiers, each with a clearly disclosed source and refresh cadence. We do not republish third-party-licensed price data without a license, and we do not currently ingest FPDS, customs declarations, or BIS export-control filings — those are roadmap items, not live sources today.
| Tier | Source | Cadence | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| T1 | Yahoo Finance /v8/finance/chart — direct futures (HG=F, ALI=F, SI=F, PL=F, PA=F, MTF=F) and single-name equity proxies (MP, LYC.AX, AXTI, UAMY, LGO, MTRN, etc.). Free, ~15 min delayed. | Daily | 31/58 |
| T2 | ETF basket proxies (REMX rare earths, LIT lithium, URA uranium, PALL palladium, BATT battery metals, PICK mining). Used when no direct futures contract or single-name proxy exists. | Daily | 18/58 |
| T3 | USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries — annual averages curated by hand against the primary January MCS issue. Authoritative for long-tail oxides, ferro-alloys, and obscure specialty minerals. | Annual | 9/58 |
| T4 | LLM-extracted narrative signals from Google News RSS, structured through a Zod schema and tagged with tier=4 in metadata. Never displace a T1–T3 numeric observation; used for catalyst-calendar and MOS-score input only. | Daily | 58/58 (signals only) |
| — | No public proxy yet — surfaces as — in the watchlist rather than fabricating. Candidates for hand-curation in the next USGS MCS pass. | — | 0/58 |
All pipelines run on a published Vercel cron schedule, codified in vercel.json at the repo root. Manual triggers are authenticated with CRON_SECRET for backfill and inspection.
/api/cron/ingest-prices (Yahoo / ETF proxies → mineral_prices)/api/cron/extract-signals (Google News RSS + LLM → intelligence_signals)/api/cron/seed-catalysts (curated catalyst calendar → regulatory_events)/api/cron/seed-usgs-prices (USGS MCS annual seed → mineral_prices)Forward-dated regulatory events (export-control review windows, DPA Title III award decisions, USGS statutory list refreshes, EXIM disbursement windows, Section 232 investigation reporting dates) are hand-curated in packages/config/src/catalysts.data.json. Every entry cites a primary source URL (MOFCOM, USGS, DLA, BIS, Federal Register, etc.) and is upserted into the database weekly. The full calendar with T-minus countdowns is published at /intel/catalysts.
We publish this section so readers can calibrate expectations against what the system actually does today. Live and scheduled: USAspending past-pricing pulls, daily MOS scoring across 58 minerals, daily commodity-price agents, and the internal NAICS triage behind our federal sourcing build. In active build: per-entity monitoring, versioned citation snapshots, attachment parsing and LLM-assisted scope extraction, FPDS and BIS ingestion. We will update this page as those move from build to live.
Where we earn finder, success, or referral fees on transactions we surface or facilitate, we disclose the relationship. See /disclosure for our standing disclosures and the categories of fees we charge.