Quantarded Weekly Signals #002 — Week 1, 2026

Welcome to the first issue of Quantarded for 2026.

Last week closed the year with a familiar pattern: strong early moves, followed by fading momentum as conviction weakened. That behavior carried through the turn of the year.

Also, week 1 is often an awkward transition period. Liquidity and participation normalize only gradually, portfolios are reset, and attention spreads across many narratives at once. Historically, this tends to produce activity without clean consensus, and that is exactly what the data reflects this week.

For context, this week Quantarded processed 32 House trade disclosures filed during the week, 171,587 Reddit comments analyzed and 11,613 stock ticker mentions detected and classified.

Maduro, Nike, and the internet

This week also featured an unusual moment where geopolitics, memes, and consumer brands collided on the timeline.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was captured by U.S. forces and flown to New York to face federal charges, a development that has drawn widespread international reaction and will likely continue to shape geopolitical risk sentiment (CBS).

In parallel with this event, reports indicate that some U.S. investors are already planning travel to Venezuela in 2026 to assess investment conditions and opportunities, especially in energy-related sectors (Business Insider).

From a market perspective, events like this introduce an additional layer of geopolitical uncertainty. It is too early to say how this will interact with retail sentiment and positioning data, but it is worth keeping in mind as we interpret signals in the coming weeks. (Reuters)

A significant share of discussion appears to be driven by a viral moment that spread rapidly across social platforms and WSB, linking Nike’s Tech Fleece to Maduro-related imagery. That specific Nike Tech Fleece worn by Maduro reportedly went out of stock on Nike’s site, and Google Trends activity spiked sharply, reinforcing the feedback loop (see).

How to read this newsletter

As always, this issue looks at three layers:

1. Reddit sentiment, capturing where retail attention and conviction are clustering.

2. House trade disclosures, to detect position building rather than one-off trades.

3. Performance tracking, showing what actually happened after publication.

None of these is a trading system on its own. The value is in how they reinforce, or contradict, each other.

Reddit picks — strong activity, selective consensus

To assign a BUY or SELL, Quantarded requires a minimum sentiment imbalance. Volume alone is not enough. That said, unusually large discussion is still worth calling out, even when conviction is not absolute.

Here are the most relevant Reddit signals for Week 1.

$CVX: BUY, high confidence

$CVX is the cleanest signal of the week by a wide margin. Sentiment skew is strong, participation is broad across threads, and disagreement remains limited as volume increases. This is a textbook case of consensus forming rather than noise accumulating. It is also one of the names most plausibly linked to renewed discussion around Venezuela and energy exposure, which helps explain why agreement remained stable rather than polarizing.

$NKE: BUY, medium confidence

$NKE stands out as the strongest signal of the week, but it deserves context, as explained in the introduction of this issue.

From a signal perspective, this matters because Quantarded measures consensus, not intent. The system captures the fact that many independent conversations converged on the same ticker with aligned sentiment. It does not distinguish between a fundamental thesis and a meme-driven catalyst.

The result is a very strong short-term consensus signal, paired with higher-than-usual uncertainty around durability. Whether this evolves into sustained positioning or fades as the meme decays is something we will be watching closely.

$NVDA: BUY, medium confidence

$NVDA shows a solid BUY signal, driven more by steady accumulation of positive sentiment than by a single catalyst. Volume is moderate, imbalance is healthy, and discussion is relatively evenly distributed. This reads as ongoing conviction rather than a reactionary spike.

$MU: BUY, low confidence

$MU sits at the lower bound of conviction this week. Volume is healthy, but sentiment is more dispersed, and imbalance is modest. This is a marginal signal that clears the threshold, but only narrowly. It reflects interest rather than agreement.

$XOM: BUY, low confidence

A moderate BUY signal. Activity is lower, sentiment skew is positive, but dispersion remains visible. This is a valid signal, though not a strong one.

Taken together, Week 1 shows active debate rather than unified conviction. There are valid BUY signals, but only a small subset where consensus is truly strong.

House trades — activity below the signal threshold

House trade disclosures this week show activity, but no conviction.

Quantarded uses a conservative filter for House signals. In practice, this means that trades below $100k are treated as informational context rather than actionable signals. The idea is simple: small, one-off trades are common and noisy, while sustained exposure at meaningful size is where patterns start to emerge.

This week, no disclosed trade clears that threshold.

That does not mean nothing happened, but it does mean nothing qualifies as a pick.

A few examples help illustrate the point.

• The largest single trades of the week, at roughly $60k, still fall well below the level where Quantarded starts to look for consolidation. These trades appear in isolation and are not reinforced by repeated filings or follow-up activity.

• Josh Gottheimer (D, NJ-05) reported a cluster of small trades, mostly around $1k, across a wide range of tickers including $HD, $BHP, $CSW, $HUBS, and others.

The diversity of names and the small size suggest routine portfolio adjustments rather than directional positioning.

Across the dataset, the pattern is consistent: small trade sizes, limited repetition in the same ticker and no sustained accumulation over recent weeks.

In other words, the House data is informative by absence this week. There is movement, but no clear signal of positions being built or unwound at scale. That restraint is intentional. Not every week produces a House signal, and forcing one here would be misleading.

Performance review — what actually happened

This is the third issue, which means we can now move beyond anecdotes and look at outcomes with a bit more structure.

Below is a breakdown of how each pick from last week behaved, followed by a cumulative view.

Last week’s results

The pattern is consistent with what we have seen before: strong early moves, uneven follow-through and a wide dispersion between individual names. Some of the largest contributors were also the most volatile, reinforcing that these signals capture bursts of attention, not smooth trends.

End of week return: +9.95%

The difference between raw and weighted results reflects position sizing and confidence weighting doing their job: reducing the impact of the most volatile names while still capturing upside.

YTD (2026) return: +1.94%

It is still very early in the year, but the takeaway is already clear: gains come in waves, flat periods are common, and signal strength matters more than signal count.

Total cumulative return: +12.31%

From the initial $10,000 baseline, the portfolio now stands at $11,231.46.

This section will continue to grow over time. The goal is to make the behavior of the system explicit and transparent.

Knowing the algorithm — how we consolidate consensus on WSB

This week’s picks are a good excuse to explain how Quantarded distinguishes consensus from noise.

Raw sentiment is not enough, since a 55/45 split across thousands of comments is very different from a 90/10 split across fewer but consistent threads. One is disagreement at scale, and the other is a crowd moving together.

Quantarded explicitly rewards agreement.

This idea is not new. In collective behavior and information aggregation, consensus strength matters more than raw volume. Large but polarized groups are noisier than smaller groups with stable agreement (Banerjee, A Simple Model of Herd Behavior; Lorenz et al., How Social Influence Can Undermine the Wisdom of Crowd).

At a high level, consensus emerges when:

• BUY or SELL sentiment dominates across both submissions and comments
• discussion is spread across multiple threads, not driven by a single viral post
• imbalance remains stable as volume increases

Mathematically, this means confidence grows only when imbalance persists. A simplified way to think about it is:

Where:

• volume captures how much attention exists,
• imbalance captures directional agreement,
• consistency penalizes polarization and single-thread concentration.

Crucially, volume alone is not enough. If imbalance collapses as volume grows, confidence does not increase. This mirrors findings from opinion dynamics and consensus modeling, where disagreement scales faster than signal in polarized environments (DeGroot, Reaching a Consensus).

This is why $NKE and $CVX score so highly this week. They are not just popular. They show repeated agreement across independent conversations.

By contrast, $PLTR generates enormous attention, but with visible disagreement. That still produces a signal, but with lower confidence. Attention without agreement is volatility, not consensus.

The goal here is not to predict outcomes. It is to identify when a crowd is moving together, rather than arguing loudly. That distinction is subtle, but it matters.

Weeks like this are a reminder that consensus can form around both fundamentals and memes. The algorithm treats them identically at the signal level; the difference shows up later, in persistence.

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

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