Methodology

This page explains how Orpail works: where our data comes from, how we turn scattered chatter into a single attention signal, and what that signal does and does not mean. Transparency is the point. You should never have to take a number on faith.

The short version

We continuously collect public discussion about assets from many sources, clean and normalise it, and measure three things: how much an asset is being discussed, how fast that is changing, and how broadly it is spreading. Combined, that is Social Heat, a 0 to 100 measure of attention intensity. It is awareness, not a forecast.

Where the data comes from

We scan a wide range of public sources: social platforms, forums, and news wires. Deliberately, that includes both the niche corners that tend to move first and the mainstream sources that confirm a move later. The goal is coverage broad enough that we are measuring genuine, market-wide attention rather than one community in isolation.

We only use publicly available activity. We do not access private data.

How we clean it

Raw mention counts are misleading on their own, so before anything is scored we:

• Deduplicate. Reposts, cross-posts, and obvious spam are collapsed so a single message echoed a thousand times does not masquerade as broad interest.
• Filter bots and coordinated noise where we can detect it, so manufactured hype does not inflate a score.
• Normalise against each asset's own baseline. Ten mentions is a lot for a quiet small-cap and nothing for a mega-cap. We measure activity relative to what is normal for that specific asset, not in raw counts.

How Social Heat is built

Social Heat combines three measurable drivers, read together because any one alone misleads:

Volume is how much an asset is being discussed, relative to its baseline.

Velocity is how fast that volume is changing. A move from quiet to busy carries more information than a permanently loud asset.

Breadth is how widely attention is spread across different, independent communities. Attention broadening across many unconnected sources at once is far more meaningful, and far harder to fake, than volume concentrated in one place. We weight breadth heavily for this reason.

These combine into a single 0 to 100 score, computed the same way for every asset so stocks and crypto are comparable. Crucially, we show the drivers behind each score, so you can always see whether something is hot because of heavy volume, sudden acceleration, or attention spreading broadly. There is no black box.

Stage intelligence

Beyond the score, we classify where an asset sits in its attention arc, early, surging, active, or cooling, so you can tell something just heating up from something already past its peak. A high score alone does not tell you that; the stage does.

Sentiment

We do measure sentiment, but we treat it with caution and weight it lightly. Sentiment polarity, whether discussion reads bullish or bearish, is genuinely noisy: sarcasm, memes, and irony make it hard to score, and it often reacts to price rather than leading it. We surface it as context, not as the core of the signal. Attention, not mood, does the heavy lifting. We explain why in attention vs sentiment.

What Social Heat does and does not tell you

A high Social Heat means an asset is drawing unusual attention, that something is happening and more eyes are on it. That is real, useful information.

It does not mean the price will move, and it is not a buy or sell signal. We have tested whether social attention predicts price and, like the research, found it does not do so reliably. Social Heat tells you where the market's focus is going, often before it shows up in price or mainstream coverage. What you do with that is your decision, weighed alongside your own research and everything else. For more on this, see what is Social Heat and our guide to social sentiment and the stock market.

A note on what we are

Orpail provides informational and educational data about publicly available social and news activity. It is not investment advice, not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security or digital asset, and not a prediction of price or performance. Social attention is one lens among many and does not indicate future results. Always do your own research.

If you want this view of market attention for yourself, get early access here.