Every day, millions of people make investment decisions based on what someone said on TV, tweeted, or filed with the SEC. Jim Cramer says buy. Cathie Wood adds a position. A politician discloses a trade. The headline drops, the stock moves, and everyone reacts.
But nobody goes back to check. Did the stock actually go up? Did following that headline beat just buying the S&P 500? Was the person right, or were they just loud?
We track the public signal — the headlines you actually see in your news feed — and measure what happened next. Not every trade a person makes. Just the ones that made the news. Because that's the information you, the reader, would have actually seen and potentially acted on.
We built GotReceipts to answer that question with data, not opinions.
There's no shortage of people telling you what to buy. The problem is nobody keeps score. A TV analyst can recommend a stock, watch it drop 40%, and never mention it again. A politician can disclose a trade months after making it, and by the time you hear about it, the edge is gone.
GotReceipts tracks every public stock call we can find — buys, sells, upgrades, downgrades — and measures what happened next. Not what someone says their record is. What the data says it is.
GotReceipts doesn't claim to capture every trade a person makes. We track the public signal — the headline that appears in your news feed, the TV clip that trends on social media, the analyst note that moves the stock.
This is deliberate. We're not measuring a person's private holdings. We're measuring something more specific: if you saw that headline and acted on it, would you have made money?
Our data is based on published reporting — news articles, analyst coverage, disclosed filings that make the news. If someone makes a trade that never becomes a headline, we don't track it. If an SEC filing gets covered by the press, we track it from the date of the coverage, not the date of the filing — because that's when you would have seen it.
Both are valid. They answer different questions for different audiences. Tools like congressional trade trackers and 13F databases answer the first one well. We answer the second one: what happens when the public follows the public signal?
The number of picks we found is always visible on every receipt. The sources are always linked. If we found 13 headlines, we say 13 — not "complete record." The data is the data.
We scan published news daily for every person we track. We're looking for headlines where someone makes a directional call on a specific stock — not just mentions, but actual signals.
Every headline gets classified as a buy signal, a sell signal, or excluded. The direction comes from the language of the headline, not our opinion.
Headlines without a clear directional call are excluded. We'd rather miss a pick than misclassify one.
The entry price is the closing price on the next trading day after the headline is published. This is intentionally conservative — it's the earliest a regular investor could realistically act on the news.
A pick needs at least 5 trading days before it counts toward verdict, average return, and win rate. Brand-new picks stay visible in the list but are marked pending until the market has had time to react.
For open positions, we track the current price. For closed positions (person publicly exits the stock), we use the exit price. Then we compare against what the S&P 500 did over the exact same time window.
This is the key: we don't compare against the S&P over some arbitrary period. We compare over the exact same dates as the pick. Same dollars, same timing, different investment. That's the only fair test.
Every pick is weighted equally — $100 into each headline. We average the returns across all picks, and we average the S&P returns over the same matching windows. The difference is the alpha — did following this person's headlines beat or trail the market?
A negative alpha means following their headlines did worse than just buying the index. A positive alpha means they added value beyond what the market gave you for free.
Click it. Read the original headline. Look up the price on Yahoo Finance. Verify every number yourself. If we got something wrong, you'll know — and so will we.