Methodology · Version 1.0 · Updated 2026-08-28

How the numbers are made

Every figure Pulse publishes follows the same path: define the unit, aggregate over a stated window, apply a publication threshold, and strip anything that could identify an account or a person. This page is the canonical description of that path. When it changes, the version number changes with it.

The unit of measurement

Pulse is derived from anonymized, aggregate operational telemetry of the PineConnector bridge — the connector that carries TradingView alerts into MetaTrader 4 and 5.

Tracked instruction

One instruction received by the bridge, counted once at its source rather than once per destination account. It is not a broker fill, an executed order, an open position, a unique trading idea, a distinct strategy, or a human decision.

Entry instruction

A tracked instruction carrying a recognised entry command — long, short, market, pending and close-and-reverse variants. Market, direction and exit-field statistics are computed over entry instructions only.

Management and other instructions

Every tracked instruction that is not an entry: closes, modifications, cancellations and other recognised or unrecognised non-entry commands. We do not call this group "management activity" alone, because it is not exclusively management.

Active connected account

A licence with at least one relevant instruction in the window. It is deliberatelynot called a customer, a trader, a person or a subscriber: one customer may hold several licences, and licence-to-customer resolution is incomplete. Reading "account" as "person" will overcount.

Windows and comparison

• Matched windows. A month is compared against the same day-range of the prior month, so both sides contain the same number of days and a comparable weekday mix. The current edition covers 2026-08-01 to 2026-08-27 against 2026-07-01 to 2026-07-27.
• Preliminary editions. An edition published before month-end is labelled preliminary and month-to-date on every page that carries it. It is recomputed for the full month and entirely replaced — we do not selectively keep whichever preliminary figures aged well.
• No rolling windows. Calendar periods only, with no overlap between editions.
• Revisions. If a published figure is corrected, the page states the correction and the prior value. Figures are never changed silently.

The metrics, and why there are two

The two headline measures answer different questions and routinely disagree. Publishing only one would be a choice presented as a fact, so Pulse publishes both.

Reach

The share of active connected accounts with at least one instruction in a market or class — how widespread it is. Reach is multi-select: one account can trade several markets, so reach figures do not sum to 100%.

Activity share

The share of tracked entry instructions belonging to a market or class — how busy it is. Instruction-weighted, so a high-volume account contributes more. Activity shares within one figure sum to 100%, including the stated remainder.

Index (time series)

Weekday activity is published as an index against the average weekday = 100, which corrects for months containing unequal numbers of each weekday. Hour-of-day is published as a share of the period's entry instructions and sums to 100%.

All shares and percentages are reported to one decimal place; changes between months are given in percentage points (pp) for shares and percent (%) for activity levels.

Publication threshold

• A named market is published only if it clears at least 100 distinct connected accounts in both windows being compared. Markets below it are excluded, never estimated.
• Markets that clear the threshold in one window but not the other are named as such, rather than silently appearing or vanishing between editions.
• Only normalised public market names are published. Raw broker symbols, with their venue-specific suffixes, never appear.
• Symbol normalization maps broker variants onto one canonical instrument before aggregation; command echoes and test rows are excluded outright rather than bucketed into "Other."

How direction is counted

Direction figures describe historical entry instructions. They are computed two ways, and both are published side by side:

• Activity-weighted — every entry instruction counts once, so the busiest accounts carry the most influence.
• Per-account — each account's own long share is computed first, then averaged with every account weighted equally. This is not the median account and not "the typical trader."

Where the two diverge, the divergence is the finding, and Pulse says so rather than picking the more striking number.

What is never published

Every release passes these checks before publication:

• Aggregates only. No licence, account, customer or order identifiers of any kind.
• No absolute totals — no instruction counts, account counts, customer counts or daily volumes. Pulse is a percentage-led publication by policy.
• No figure published for a slice small enough that one account's activity could move it visibly.
• No broker, server or prop-firm attribution.
• No balances, equity, margin, lot sizes, P&L or execution results.
• No raw alerts, raw symbols, raw commands, strategy names, credentials, IP or device data.

What this data cannot tell you

Pulse describes one population — retail traders automating through the PineConnector bridge — and should not be read as a measurement of the whole retail market. Specifically, these statements are not supported by anything published here:

• "X% of positions were long." Direction describes entry instructions, not open positions, exposure or position sizes.
• "Traders were bullish." Instruction direction is not sentiment, and no instruction here is known to have been profitable.
• "X% of traders don't use stop losses." Exit-field statistics describe fields present in parsed instruction text. Protection may come from connector settings, a later instruction, or strategy logic — none of which are visible here.
• "The average trader became X% more active." Per-account means are arithmetic averages, not medians.
• "These were executed trades." Instructions received by the bridge are not broker fills.
• Anything about a market below the publication threshold.

Where a figure is provisional — a pending timezone confirmation, a pending concentration check — the page carrying it says so on its face rather than in a footnote.

Citing Pulse

Every section carries a suggested-citation block with a canonical URL, and every edition keeps a permanent address at /editions/YYYY-MM/ so citations stay valid after the next issue ships. Figures and tables may be republished with attribution and a link to the source page.

Questions about the data or the method: reach the team viapineconnector.com.