Guide

How to read a brief on this desk

Timestamp, source line, tags, and when to ignore the rewrite and open the original.

A brief is a scan, not a story

Each item on the wire is a rewrite of a public RSS headline and summary. It is meant to answer four questions in a few seconds: what moved, who published it, which names we tagged, and whether we have a delayed last to put next to it. If you need the reporting, open the source. The outbound link is the product, not a courtesy.

We do not sit in the press room. If a number was not in the source summary, it should not appear in the brief. When it does, that is a bug: mail hello@bluntmarkets.com with the item URL.

Read the timestamp first

Briefs are stamped in UTC. A Sunday night oil headline and a Monday cash open are different sessions. If the strip still shows Friday's USO close, you are mixing tapes. The time on the card is when the item hit our wire, not when the event happened in local TV time.

Quiet mode and follows only change what you see, not what the clock says. A brief you already opened can look 'new' after a refresh if you are sorting by the publisher stamp. Trust the UTC line over your phone's sense of 'just now.'

Source line vs the rewrite

The source line names the publisher (BBC Business, CNBC Markets, and so on). The body is our desk copy: shorter, fewer adjectives, no question headlines, no buy/sell language. Credit stays with the reporter. If the rewrite and the original disagree, the original wins.

BBC and similar feeds sometimes append tracking parameters. We strip those from the outbound URL when we can. The destination should still be the article, not a homepage.

Tags, levels, and Size this move

Tags are a classifier, not a human editor. A brief about one semiconductor is not automatically a QQQ story. Wrong tags happen. Levels only render when a tagged name has a delayed last. No box is better than a fake print.

Size this move prefills the P&L calculator from that delayed last and a percent change when both exist. Treat it as arithmetic on a stale number. It is not a live bid, and it is not a recommendation to put the size on.

When to ignore the wire

Halts, limit-up, and weekend FX opens. Single-name premarket color that will not show in SPY. Any brief that still sounds like a tip after the rewrite (also a bug). Anything you would not check against a primary tape before acting.

The job of the wire is to sort attention. Open the source, then a tool if you want to size an assumption you already hold. Then leave.