How we verify the numbers in a story
Every figure that appears in a Trading Floor brief is traced to a primary source, checked against a second, and logged before the story is published.
Financial journalism runs on numbers, and numbers are where errors hide. A misplaced decimal, a percentage confused with a percentage point, a quarter compared with the wrong quarter: each is small, each is easy to make, and each undermines the reason a reader came to us. This post sets out the process we use to keep them out.
Primary sources first
Every figure in a brief must trace to a primary source: a company filing, a statistical release, an exchange's published data or a central bank statement. A number quoted in another outlet's story is a lead, not a source. If we cannot find the primary document, we do not use the number, and we say so if it matters to the story.
Where a figure comes from a market data feed, we record the timestamp and the venue. Prices change; a story that says a yield "rose to" a level needs to say when, and readers should be able to reconcile the figure with what they see on their own screen.
Two-source rule for anything that moves markets
For figures that could move a price, such as earnings, guidance, deal terms or economic data, we require a second confirmation before publication. Usually that means checking the filing against the company's own press release, or a data release against the agency's tables rather than its summary. The two sources occasionally disagree, and finding out why has caught errors in both.
The arithmetic check
Reporters compute every derived figure themselves rather than taking it from a source. If a company says revenue rose 12 per cent, we check that against the two reported figures. If a press release reports a margin, we recompute it. Rounding produces small differences, which we note; larger differences are a signal that something in the release needs a closer look.
Percentage changes and percentage-point changes are the most common confusion, and we have a house rule: a change in a rate is always expressed in points or basis points, never as a percentage of the rate.
The log
Each story carries an internal note listing every figure, its source, the URL or document reference and who checked it. The note is not published, but it means that a correction, if one is needed, can be traced in minutes rather than hours. It also lets an editor see at a glance whether a story leans on one document or several.
Corrections
When we get something wrong, we correct the story, note the correction at the foot of the piece with the date and what changed, and record it in a corrections log that the editor reviews monthly. Patterns in that log have changed our process twice this year, once on how we handle currency conversions and once on time zones in publication stamps.
None of this guarantees perfection. It does mean that when a number appears in a Trading Floor story, someone has looked at where it came from and done the sum.