Methodology

How we score trust

Every story we ingest carries a single visible trust badge. The badge tells a trader, in 200 milliseconds, whether the story is from a primary source they can trade on, a licensed publisher they can rely on, or a reference aggregator they should verify. The rubric is public so it can be audited and challenged.

The three trust rings

PRIMARY

Exchange & regulator

BSE notices, NSE corporate announcements, SEBI orders and circulars, RBI press releases, MCA filings. The story is the document itself. No editorial layer, no opinion.

VERIFIED

Licensed publisher

Reputable Indian financial news publishers with editorial standards, named bylines, and a corrections policy. Currently: Economic Times Markets, LiveMint Markets/Money/Industry/Companies, ET Stocks, ET News, ET Finance, ET Policy.

REFERENCE

Aggregator

Topical news aggregators (Google News). Useful for breadth and discovery, not for confirmation. Always verify by clicking through to the original source.

What you will not see on Stack Leaf

No tipster channels. No anonymous "operator calls", "intraday tips", or "guaranteed returns". Anyone offering these in India is, almost without exception, violating SEBI Investment Adviser regulations.
No fabricated quotes. AI summaries are generated only from the underlying source body, never from the headline alone. Numbers are taken verbatim or omitted.
No paid placement in news. Every story you see is here because of trust ring, not because anyone paid us. We will never run sponsored stories disguised as news. Clearly labeled ad units may appear in the future, never inside the trust feed.
No advisory language. Stack Leaf is a news platform, not a SEBI-Registered Investment Adviser or Research Analyst. We do not say "buy", "sell", or "hold" anywhere in the product. AI outputs are tone-checked for advisory language.

AI confidence

Each AI summary inherits a confidence band from its source's trust ring:

HIGH · summary from a PRIMARY source. Likely to be load-bearing.

MEDIUM · summary from a VERIFIED publisher. Editorial framing applies.

LOW · summary from a REFERENCE aggregator. Treat as a pointer; click through.

Mistakes & corrections

If you see a wrong AI summary, an off-base ticker tag, or a story that should not have a trust badge, write to hello@stackleaf.studio with the URL. We respond inside 24 hours and the correction is logged with timestamp.

Last updated 2026-05-10. Methodology is open for public challenge.