Quantarded Weekly Signals #005 — Week 4, 2026

Welcome to the fourth issue of Quantarded for 2026.

Week 4 marks a noticeable shift in tone versus the prior weeks. Attention remains high, but conviction thins out quickly once you move past the top of the distribution. Both Reddit sentiment and House disclosures show activity, but only a small subset of that activity clears the bar for being considered a meaningful signal.

This is one of those weeks where the absence of strong reinforcement is itself informative.

For context, this week Quantarded processed 23 House trade disclosures filed during the week, 285,241 Reddit comments analyzed and 32,167 stock ticker mentions detected and classified. As always, what matters is not volume alone, but how agreement evolves as volume grows.

How to read this newsletter

As always, we look at three complementary layers:

1. Reddit sentiment, to understand where retail attention and directional agreement are forming.

2. House trade disclosures, to detect position building rather than isolated or symbolic trades.

3. Performance review, to keep ourselves honest about what actually happened.

None of these layers is decisive on its own. The signal lives in their overlap, and just as importantly, in where that overlap fails to materialize.

Reddit picks — thin conviction, clear ordering

This week’s list is ordered by relative signal strength. The gap between the top names and the bottom of the list is narrower than usual, which matters for interpretation.

$INTC: SELL, 25% share

$INTC is the clearest directional signal in the dataset this week, and the only one that reaches a high-confidence threshold. The sentiment skew is consistently negative, with fewer mixed or ambiguous mentions than the rest of the field. Importantly, this is not driven by a single spike, but by sustained tone across multiple discussion threads.

Recent reporting highlights a pronounced drawdown: Intel shares plunged sharply after the company issued a cautious quarterly outlook and flagged ongoing supply and production constraints, which has tempered optimism around its AI-driven demand rebound. See Financial Times coverage of the stock drop and a complementary Reuters summary of the plunge.

$MU: BUY, 25% share

$MU sits at the top of the BUY side. The signal is constructive rather than exuberant, but it clears the imbalance requirement with room to spare. Compared to prior weeks, conviction is slightly softer, yet still coherent enough to stand out.

Contextually, memory chip producers including Micron have attracted attention amid ongoing semiconductor supply challenges. Some analysts highlight how memory shortages are creating pricing pressure and structural demand that could benefit suppliers like Micron. For an industry perspective, see this recent overview of tight memory markets and their implications: Yahoo! Finance on memory dynamics.

$SLV: BUY, 20% share

$SLV qualifies as a BUY, but only marginally. Discussion volume is healthy, yet sentiment is more fragmented, with bullish narratives frequently countered by skepticism. This is a classic example of a name that remains relevant without commanding consensus.

Silver markets have been unusually active, crossing multi-year highs and drawing attention for flows that have shifted from other assets into precious metals. While not directly news about the ETF itself, broader market signals — such as historic advances in silver prices in January — add context to why SLV remains in the basket. See a recent metals price recap: TheStreet on silver’s rally.

$META: BUY, 15% share

$META appears again this week, but the signal has decayed significantly. While it technically meets the BUY criteria, the imbalance is shallow and confidence low. This is better read as persistent attention rather than a strong directional call.

On the news front, Meta continues to draw mixed sentiment as analysts and investors parse its Reality Labs cuts and long-term investments against broader digital ad trends. There is not a single dominant story this week, but the stock remains in focus alongside mega-cap tech peers (as noted in broad market coverage like Reuters’ wrap that includes Meta among lifting names even as the tape stayed cautious). See: Reuters — S&P 500 and Nasdaq market context.

$NVDA: BUY, 15% share

$NVDA rounds out the list. It remains heavily discussed, but directional agreement is minimal. Inclusion here is less about conviction and more about visibility: it is still a name retail participants cannot ignore, even when they do not agree.

Nvidia has been relatively resilient amid the recent tape and has at times outperformed parts of the semiconductor group. Broad market reporting shows Nvidia among large-cap tech names that contributed to intraday lifts even on risk-off days. Recent context on trading levels and analyst sentiment can be found here: Investing.com snapshot of NVDA price and outlook.

Overall, Week 4’s Reddit basket is fragile. One clear SELL, one reasonably solid BUY, and three names that sit close to the threshold. This is not a week where Reddit sentiment alone argues for aggressive positioning.

House trades — a single, isolated signal

Only one trade passes the filters used by Quantarded to qualify as a potential signal:

• Kevin Hern (R, House) disclosed a SELL of $UNH valued at $250,001, traded on 2025-12-23 and filed on 2026-01-22.

On paper, this is a large trade. In practice, it lacks reinforcement. There is no clustering across multiple filers, no follow-up activity, and no broader pattern of consolidation around the name.

Performance review – what actually happened

Week 4 turned out to be a tough one. It's the first week we close with a negative result.

Broad markets were already under pressure going into the week, and that mattered. Over the same five-day window, $NDAQ closed at $98.05, down -2.90%, while the $SPX finished the week at 6,915, down -0.35%.

A large part of that weakness was headline-driven. Markets reacted to renewed policy and geopolitical uncertainty after Trump-related trade rhetoric resurfaced, alongside comments involving Greenland that reintroduced noise around U.S. foreign policy and tariffs. That kind of backdrop tends to compress risk appetite and makes short-horizon signals noisier and less persistent. A good snapshot of that environment is captured in Reuters’ global markets coverage from mid-week (Reuters)

Last week’s results

Note: 2026-01-19 was a market holiday (MLK Day), so the first trading day was 2026-01-20.

Portfolio tracking

Using the running history you provided, the portfolio now stands at:

• End of 26W4 return: -1.91%
• YTD (2026) return: +11.72%
• Cumulative return since inception (weighted): +23.06%

Knowing the algorithm — how we read Reddit without overfitting it

This week’s technical note is about the prompt layer we use to analyze Reddit messages.

At a glance, the task sounds trivial: find stock tickers and classify sentiment. In practice, r/wallstreetbets is adversarial text. Sarcasm, slang, memes, and deliberate ambiguity dominate a large fraction of the data. Precision matters far more than coverage.

That design philosophy is encoded directly into the prompt. For example, the model is explicitly instructed to favor not returning a result over returning a dubious one:

“You must prioritize precision over recall.”

and reinforced again with:

“If you are unsure, return no ticker.”

This may sound conservative, but it is intentional. False positives pollute downstream aggregation far more than missed mentions, especially when signals are built from relative imbalance.

Ticker detection itself is tightly constrained. Common words and short tokens are treated as invalid unless the author clearly signals intent:

“Common English words or abbreviations (IT, FOR, ALL, ON, NOW, BE, SO, OR, DAY, GO, YOU, AI, etc.) are false positives unless explicitly written with a ‘$’ prefix.”

This single rule eliminates a surprising amount of noise that would otherwise masquerade as sentiment.

Sentiment classification follows a similar philosophy. We do not care about tone, profanity, or meme energy. We care about intent toward owning the stock. The prompt states this explicitly:

“Sentiment must reflect the author's intent toward owning the stock.”

That distinction matters. A sarcastic post can still be bullish. A cautious post can still be a BUY. Conversely, excitement without intent is neutral.

Another subtle but important rule is how we treat uncertainty and nuance:

“If the text presents a reasoned bullish or bearish thesis (even with caveats), it is NOT neutral.”

This avoids collapsing thoughtful discussion into the neutral bucket, which would systematically bias the signal toward shallow hype.

Finally, confidence is not a stylistic flourish. It is a gating mechanism:

“High confidence (>0.85) requires explicit or strongly implied intent.”

Ambiguous cases are allowed through, but only at lower confidence, which naturally dampens their influence once aggregated.

The net effect of these constraints is a signal that is conservative by construction. It reacts more slowly, ignores large amounts of noisy content, and misses some fleeting opportunities. That is a trade-off we accept deliberately.

Over time, it produces fewer surprises, fewer false spikes, and weekly snapshots that tend to make sense in hindsight, even when performance is uneven.

Disclaimer

This newsletter is NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE.

All content is provided for informational and educational purposes only. Markets involve risk, including loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Always do your own research and consider consulting a licensed financial professional.

Links

Website: https://quantarded.com

Subscribe: https://quantarded.kit.com/products/monthly-subscription?step=checkout