How These Pieces Are Evidenced

Every figure in Sound Decisions carries a source and a date. This page says where those figures come from, what gets checked before a piece runs, and what the evidence cannot say. If you want to argue with a number here, this is the page that tells you how.

Where the figures come from

Company figures come from annual reports filed with the SEC, read from the filings themselves rather than from a summary. Each one carries the accession number of the filing it came from, so you can open the same document I did.

Market and category figures come from public statistical sources: the US Census Bureau for how many firms operate in a category and what they pay in wages; the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve for prices, both what shoppers pay and what producers charge; the IMF for global commodity prices.

Search figures come from Google's own advertising data, which reports how many people search for a term in a month and how that has moved over a year. Attention figures come from Wikipedia pageviews, which measure curiosity rather than demand and are labelled that way wherever they appear.

Where a piece quotes what a company says about itself, it uses the company's own words from a filing, an earnings release or prepared remarks — not a paraphrase of them.

What gets checked before a piece runs

A control. No piece claims a whole market moved without measuring something outside that market. If a category's search demand fell by half, I measure eight to ten unrelated terms as well. If those fell the same way, the finding is a measurement problem and the piece does not run. If they held while the subject fell, the finding is real, and the control goes in the article where you can check it.

Whose view a measurement reports. A site-speed score from a testing service is one cold fetch from a data centre, not what a visitor on a fast connection sees. Both readings can be true at once. Any measurement of that kind says which one it is.

What a market actually is. A company's market is where its customers are, not where its office is. Sizing a local market for a business that sells nationally is a mistake I have made and corrected, and every geography figure now has to state how it was established.

Absence is not zero. When a statistical source suppresses a figure or reports nothing, that is unknown, not zero. Totals say how many inputs were left out.

What the evidence cannot say

Public data has hard limits, and a piece that hides them is worth less than one that names them.

Private companies file nothing. Whole categories are visible only through their listed competitors. Where a private company matters to a story, the piece says what cannot be known about it.

Search volume is not demand. It is what people type into a search box. Google rounds and bands the figures, and the most recent month can be incomplete. Share of search is a share of a named set of brands: adding or dropping one moves every number, so the set is always listed.

Attention is not sales. Encyclopedia pageviews and comment counts measure curiosity and conversation. They are useful, they are weak, and they are never presented as evidence of what customers bought.

Public comment is not customer research. People commenting on a video are strangers in a category, not a company's customers. That distinction is kept in every piece that uses them.

Correlation stays correlation. Where a piece offers an explanation for a pattern — why two companies cut spending, why a kind of search disappeared — the explanation is labelled as a hypothesis, with what would confirm it.

Why the figures can be re-checked

Every gathering run is stored with its date, so a claim made in one piece can be measured again later. That is the point: a figure published in September can be re-run in March, and the difference is either a finding or a correction. Both are worth publishing.

It also means these pieces can be wrong in public. When a figure here turns out to be mistaken, the correction goes in the article, dated, rather than quietly replacing what was there.

Who built this

The gathering runs on the ADMADS Engine, a tool I built and use for client work. It pulls from public sources, stamps every value with its origin and pull time, and states what a given set of evidence cannot support. It does not write conclusions. The arguments in these pieces are mine, and so are the mistakes.

Built on the ADMADS Engine: sourced, dated evidence, with its limits stated.

Sound Decisions is analysis for general information. It is not investment, financial or legal advice, not a claim of wrongdoing by any company or person, and makes no prediction about any named company. Where the author has worked with a company named in a piece, the piece says so and uses only public information. © 2026 CULT+MATH LLC.