Our methodology is public. Here's why that matters.

If you ask Tipranks why a stock has a 7/10 Smart Score, you get "we aggregate analyst consensus, hedge fund moves, insider trades, and blogger sentiment." If you ask Zacks why a stock has a #1 rank, the answer is "earnings estimate revisions" but the cutoffs are proprietary. If you ask Kavout why their Kai Score moved, you get a black-box ML answer.

Tapeline names all six. The composite is a weighted blend of Trend, Relative Strength, Fundamentals, Smart Money, Macro, and Momentum — weighted most heavily toward Trend and Relative Strength, and least toward Momentum, because short-term momentum on its own tends to mean-revert. And on every ticker you can see exactly how much each of those six factors contributed to the score in front of you.

Why be this open?

• Trust compounds when you can audit. If you find a ticker scoring 90 when its trend is clearly broken, you can call it out — and we'd rather you do that than churn silently.
• The moat isn't a secret list of factors, it's the data spine and the record. Plenty of competitors could name six factors too. None of them will publish a public scorecard back-checking every call against next-day prices the way we do.
• If the score stops working, you should leave. We'd rather you make that call honestly than discover via a slow drip of bad picks.

Any change to the factor set is versioned in our changelog. The day it changes, you see why. That's the whole product, in one paragraph.