Every number on this site is computed from primary sources — SEC EDGAR XBRL filings, FINRA short-sale files, USAspending.gov award records and live exchange prices. This page documents exactly how the derived metrics are calculated so they can be checked, cited and challenged.
Cash runway estimates how many months a pre-profit company can operate before it must raise new capital. It is the single most important solvency metric for pure-play quantum companies, nearly all of which run at a significant operating loss. Our definition is engineered to align with the runway figure most investors use as a reference — the figures match to within one month for every covered stock.
Cash — current assets only. We use cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments from the most recent balance sheet. When a filing tags a combined concept (CashCashEquivalentsAndShortTermInvestments) we use it directly, then subtract any non-current marketable securities tagged at the same balance-sheet date. When only the narrow cash concept is tagged, we add the separately-tagged current investment concepts (short-term investments, current available-for-sale debt securities). Non-current treasuries and AFS bonds are always excluded — including them inflated runway for several companies (in one case by $151M) before this methodology was adopted.
Burn — trailing twelve months (TTM), not the last annual report. Annual 10-K operating cash flow can be up to a year stale. We convert it to TTM with a bridge across the most recent 10-Q:
When a company files no 10-Q (recent IPOs, some foreign private issuers filing 20-F), we fall back to the annual figure. Companies with positive operating cash flow show "CF+" instead of a month count.
What runway is not: it ignores undrawn credit facilities, at-the-market programs and future financing — it answers "at the current burn rate, how long does the cash on the balance sheet last." Pair it with the dilution tracker to see who is actively raising.
Sector Pulse is a daily 0-100 composite read on the pure-play quantum stock sector. It is designed as a directional dashboard metric, not a trading signal. The score is recomputed from stored end-of-day price history, scored news articles and SEC dilution filings.
Momentum is the equal-weight mean 5-session return across pure-play quantum stocks, normalized so flat equals 50 and roughly +/-20% maps to the 0-100 bounds. Breadth is the percent of covered pure-play stocks closing above their own 20-day simple moving average. Sentiment is the mean Loughran-McDonald news sentiment score over the trailing seven days, included only when at least three scored articles are present. Dilution ease starts at 100 and subtracts 15 points for each S-3 or 424B dilution filing across the sector over the trailing 30 days.
Missing components are omitted and the remaining weights are renormalized, so early history is not dragged toward neutral by data that was not collected yet. Labels are: Flatline below 25, Weak from 25-44, Steady from 45-55, Elevated from 56-75 and Racing at 76 or higher.
Market cap = shares outstanding × live price. Prices refresh roughly every 60 seconds from exchange data. Share counts come from SEC EDGAR XBRL, validated against a manually maintained seed — EDGAR values outside a plausibility window of the seed are rejected (some issuers tag stale or dummy share counts). For companies whose EDGAR share data is unreliable or not yet filed, the seed is authoritative and updated manually from the latest filing cover page.
We count total shares outstanding, including private and insider stakes. This is the standard total-market-cap definition (also used by StockAnalysis). Some providers count only the publicly listed share class, which can produce very different figures for recently listed companies with large private stakes.
RSI-14 uses Wilder's smoothed moving average (the original 1978 formulation) computed over a 250-bar daily window — not the simple-average shortcut many free tools use, which overshoots on volatile small-caps. Beta is a rolling 1-year regression of daily returns against SPY, joined on trading dates.
Short volume % is daily short-sale volume ÷ total volume from FINRA's CNMS files. It is not short interest as a percent of float — a common conflation. The normal range is 40–55% for most stocks; we flag elevated bearish positioning only above 60%.
Headlines are scored with the Loughran-McDonald financial sentiment word lists — the academic standard for financial text — not a black-box ML model. Scores range −1 to +1 and label articles bullish, neutral or bearish. StockTwits sentiment counts self-labeled bullish/bearish messages over the most recent 30 posts.
Found a number that looks wrong? Data corrections are taken seriously — see about for how to reach us. Nothing on this site is financial advice.