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The News ↔ Markets panel (internal id news-market-correlation) asks whether news volume on a global topic moves with, ahead of, or behind a market. It plots GDELT topic volume against an asset price, reports a Pearson coefficient with a 95% interval, and scans hourly lags to say whether news or the market leads. The result is exploratory. Correlation and lead/lag do not establish causation, and the panel shows weak and null results rather than hiding them.

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What the panel shows

  • Controls: a news topic (default Sanctions), a market (default S&P 500), and a window of 24 hours, 3 days, 7 days (default), or 14 days.
  • Chart: GDELT news volume and the asset price on separate axes over the selected window.
  • Pearson r: the coefficient between hourly news volume and the hourly market return, with the number of aligned hourly samples (n).
  • 95% interval: the Fisher-z confidence interval for that coefficient.
  • Interpretation: a relationship label (No clear relationship, Weak / Moderate / Strong positive or negative relationship, or Insufficient aligned observations) and a lead/lag line such as News leads by 3h (r=0.41, n=120) or Neither series clearly leads.
  • Freshness: the time the market series was last updated.
Panel id is news-market-correlation; canonical component is src/components/NewsMarketCorrelationPanel.ts. The analysis lives in src/services/news-market-correlation.ts.

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Scope

The panel covers a deliberately narrow slice. Read its verdicts within these limits:
  • Six assets only. S&P 500 (^GSPC), Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC), Bitcoin (BTC-USD), Ethereum (ETH-USD), Gold (GC=F), and WTI Crude (CL=F). There is no Brent, natural gas, FX, single stock, or prediction market. An asset whose series failed to load is disabled in the selector.
  • Global topics, not countries or crises. The news series is worldwide GDELT volume for a topic. The selector offers six security topics: Military Activity, Cyber Threats, Nuclear, Sanctions, Intelligence, and Maritime Security.
  • Pearson on hourly returns. The coefficient is linear and contemporaneous within an hourly bucket. It compares news volume with the percentage price change, not with the price level.
  • No persistence. Every coefficient, interval, and lead/lag verdict is recomputed in the browser on each load. Nothing is stored, so there is no history of past verdicts.

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How you reach it

  • Cmd+K: type news market correlation, gdelt markets, lead lag, or market returns.
  • Availability by variant: enabled by default (enabled: true, priority: 1) in the full/geopolitical, finance, and commodity variants. Not registered in the tech, energy, or happy variants. Source: the 'news-market-correlation' entries in FULL_PANELS, FINANCE_PANELS, and COMMODITY_PANELS in src/config/panels.ts.

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Data sources

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Method

analyzeNewsMarketCorrelation() in src/services/news-market-correlation.ts runs these steps:
  1. Window. The window ends at the latest timestamp in either series and extends back by the selected number of hours.
  2. Hourly buckets. News points are averaged per hour. Market points keep the latest positive price per hour.
  3. Returns. The market return for an hour is the percentage change from the previous hour. A return is computed only when the two buckets are exactly one hour apart, so market closures leave gaps instead of multi-hour returns.
  4. Alignment and Pearson r. Each hourly return is paired with the news volume for the same hour. Pearson r needs at least 4 aligned samples and non-zero variance in both series; otherwise the panel shows Insufficient aligned observations.
  5. 95% interval. Fisher z-transform with a margin of 1.96 / sqrt(n - 3), mapped back to the r scale.
  6. Relationship label. If the interval spans zero, the label is No clear relationship. Otherwise the magnitude of r sets the label: weak below 0.2, moderate below 0.5, strong at 0.5 or above.
  7. Lead/lag scan. The scan pairs news at hour t with the market return at hour t + lag for every whole-hour lag from -6 to +6 and keeps the lag with the largest absolute coefficient. A positive lag means news leads; a negative lag means the market leads.
The panel reports News leads or Market leads only when the best lag meets every condition below. Otherwise it reports Neither series clearly leads.
  • The lag is not zero.
  • The lag has at least 8 aligned samples.
  • The absolute lag coefficient is at least 0.2.
  • The lag’s 95% interval excludes zero.
  • The absolute lag coefficient beats the same-hour coefficient by at least 0.05.
The lead/lag line shows the lag in hours, its coefficient, and its sample size. The 95% interval card always refers to the same-hour coefficient, not the lag.

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Refresh cadence

  • Market series: re-seeded every 15 minutes as a member of the seed-bundle-market-backup bundle. Health flags it stale after 45 minutes.
  • News series: the seed-gdelt-intel Railway service runs scripts/seed-gdelt-bulk-materializer.mjs every 15 minutes. A topic gets new volume points and a fresh timestamp only when a batch contains matching records; otherwise its series and timestamp carry over from the previous run.
  • Panel: fetches when it is near the viewport and refreshes every 15 minutes while it stays near the viewport (REFRESH_INTERVALS.newsMarketCorrelation).

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Tier & gating

Free. No premium flag in any variant registration, and both backing reads are public.