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How it works

How each number is made, step by step.

From data to an index

  1. Collect. Each indicator pulls a daily series from a public source: a price, an official statistic, a count of measured events, or a count of news reports.
  2. Measure. Prices become the size of their daily swings over 30 days, or the distance below their 90-day high. Event counts become a rolling seven-day total, starting once there are seven full days of counts.
  3. Score. Each day is compared with the past year. A score of 50 means a normal day, 0 the calmest of the year and 100 the most extreme. A day is scored only when there are at least twenty earlier values to compare it with; for a seven-day total, that takes 27 days of counts.
  4. Combine. The index is the weighted average of its indicator scores.
    When some sources don't answer

    If indicators covering less than 40% of the weight have data, we still show the average of the ones that answered, marked as an early reading, with low reliability. Its history and change figures then come from those same indicators only, so they compare like with like.

Longer reads: how to read a 0–100 reading and how events are counted. All guides are under Guides.

Reading an index

  • Level: Quiet below 35, Normal from 35 to 65, Elevated from 65 to 80, High from 80.
  • Change since: points gained or lost since 7, 30, 90 and 365 days ago.
  • Trend: higher or lower than two weeks ago if the level moved more than 5 points since then, otherwise about where it was. It can point the other way from the 7-day change, because it compares with a different day.
  • Based on: how many of the index's measures have live data. Data older than 10 days does not count as live.
  • Reliability: the share of the index's weight backed by live data. Media-based indicators count at 60%, because reports are not measurements.
  • What's moving it: the indicators pulling the index furthest from normal.

Removing the noise

  • One story, counted once. Headlines from the past 24 hours that share most of their meaningful words are grouped as one incident. Several copies on the same site count as one outlet.
  • Filed under when it happened. Measured events are placed at the moment they happened. When a report arrives much later, both times are kept, and the event's details show when it was first reported.
  • Measurements count more than reports. Instruments and official statistics are trusted fully. Media reports carry less weight in reliability and are always labelled unconfirmed.

What reaches the home page

The home page lists only events of global weight from the past 24 hours, under “What matters today”. Everything else stays on the events list. Most days nothing passes, and the page says so. If world news could not be read, the page says that instead, and shows measured events as usual.

  • Earthquakes count when the magnitude is 7.5 or more, or when the US Geological Survey’s PAGER estimate of human and economic impact is orange or red. USGS’s “significant” list is based on a significance score that a strong earthquake far from anyone can reach, so it is not used on its own here.
  • News stories count when at least 40 different websites in at least 8 different countries carried them in the past 24 hours. They are counted like this.
    1. Every two hours we read GDELT’s own lists of English-language articles. GDELT publishes one every 15 minutes. We keep the articles on war and armed conflict, natural disasters, stock markets, epidemics, cyber attacks and power cuts, elections, sanctions and terrorism, as GDELT tags them.
    2. The articles from the last 24 hours are grouped into stories by their headlines. A headline joins a story when it shares at least two key words with the headline that started it, and those make up at least half of the shorter list of words.
    3. For each story we count the different websites that carried it, and their countries. The country of a website comes from GDELT’s list of news outlets by country; a website not on that list adds no country.
    A website’s www and non-www addresses count once, as do several copies on one website; the same agency story on differently named websites counts once per website.
  • Order: measured events first, strongest first, then news stories by how many websites carried them. At most 5.

Timing. GDELT does not answer the servers this site runs on, so its lists are read on a separate schedule every two hours, and the results are saved. The home page uses them while they are less than 5 hours old and cover at least 72 of the 96 lists of the past 24 hours, so a story can take two hours or a little longer to appear. A story stays listed while it still passes the bar over the past 24 hours, however long ago it began. When the results are older or cover fewer lists, the page says world news could not be checked. Earthquakes come straight from the US Geological Survey and are not delayed this way.

Grouping by headline is blunt. Two stories that share most of their words can be counted as one, and one story told in very different words can be split in two. Only English-language articles are counted. The bar is high on purpose: most days nothing reaches it.

What's in each index

Invest

  • Financial stress (25%, FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). The St. Louis Fed's weekly stress gauge, built from 18 market measures. Above zero means more stress than normal.
  • US stock drawdown (15%, Alpha Vantage). How far the S&P 500 tracker fund (SPY) is below its 90-day high.
  • Oil price swings (10%, FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). Size of daily moves in the WTI crude price over the last 30 days.
  • Yield curve (10%, FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). 10-year minus 2-year US Treasury yield. When it falls below zero, recessions have often followed.
  • Euro swings (15%, European Central Bank via Frankfurter). Size of daily moves in the euro against the dollar over the last 30 days.
  • European currency swings (10%, European Central Bank via Frankfurter). Size of daily moves in the euro against the pound, zloty, krona, franc, koruna and krone over the last 30 days.
  • Bitcoin swings (15%, CoinGecko). Size of daily moves in the bitcoin price in euros over the last 30 days.

React

  • Strong earthquakes (20%, US Geological Survey). Magnitude 6 or stronger earthquakes anywhere in the last 7 days, measured by seismometers.
  • Storms, floods and eruptions (20%, NASA EONET). New severe storms, floods and volcanic eruptions tracked by satellite in the last 7 days.
  • Armed conflict reports (35%, The GDELT Project). Daily English-language reporting on invasions, airstrikes, coups and mobilisations, counted per day.
  • Sanctions, trade and tech shocks (25%, The GDELT Project). Daily reporting on sanctions, tariffs, embargoes, ransomware and global outages.

Be Safe

  • Hybrid incident reports (30%, The GDELT Project). Reporting on GPS jamming, airspace violations, drones, sabotage and undersea cables in the Baltic states.
  • Cyber attack reports (10%, The GDELT Project). Reporting on cyber attacks against the Baltic states.
  • Actively exploited software flaws (25%, CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities). Software flaws newly confirmed as being used by attackers, the ones that put hospitals, ports and power grids at risk.
  • Internet outages (20%, Cloudflare Radar). Measured internet outages in the Baltic states in the last 7 days.
  • Natural hazards nearby (15%, NASA EONET). Wildfires, storms and floods tracked by satellite in and around the Baltic states.

Editions

Boring News has an edition for each market: English, Latviešu, Deutsch, Polski, Suomi. Invest and React are the same everywhere. Be Safe is local: each edition counts news reports, internet outages and natural hazards for its own country (Latvia, Germany, Poland, Finland), while the English edition covers the Baltic states. Exploited software flaws are counted worldwide, since attacks don't stop at borders. News reports are counted from English-language articles only, in every edition.

Known limits of this test version

  • News-based indicators count, each day, the English-language headlines in GDELT’s lists that match their search words. Their history began when this counting started, with four lists a day filled in for the last 30 days, so for now they are compared with a shorter period than a full year. The current day is left out until it is complete, so their latest value is yesterday’s.
  • Some indicators need free API keys. Until they're connected, they show as "not connected" and the index leans on the rest.
  • Grouping headlines by wording can occasionally merge two separate stories or split one story in two.