How We Research and Where Our Numbers Come From
Every figure on this site is supposed to survive being checked. That is the whole point of this page: how we research what we publish, where our numbers come from, and which document you would open if you wanted to prove one of them wrong. The rules below are not aspirations. They are the rules the site is actually published under, and some of them exist because a specific mistake made them necessary.
The research and the writing here are done by one person rather than a rotating desk, which is worth knowing before you read any of it. That person is Nick Raffoul, and his background is set out on Nick Raffoul’s author page.
Where Our Numbers Come From
One rule sits above all the others.
Company financials come from the company. Market prices come from market data providers.
For anything a company reports about itself, we use the company’s own document and nothing else. That covers revenue, earnings, earnings per share, return on equity, margins, segment results, guidance, dividends declared and capital ratios. The source is the earnings release, the Supplementary Financial Information, or the Report to Shareholders and the MD&A. Every one of those figures carries a document and page citation, so a reader who wants to argue with a number knows exactly which page to open.
Market data is a separate category with separate sources. Share prices, index levels, daily moves, market capitalisation, earnings dates and analyst consensus come from named market data providers and are credited to them. Analyst consensus is always labelled as consensus, because it is an expectation rather than a result. What a market data provider is never allowed to be is the source of a company financial.
That split governs individual figures. Ranked lists raise a different question, which is what makes a company eligible, what gets measured and in what order. Those rules are set out separately on our methodology page.
Why We Drew That Line
On August 30, 2026 we audited the figures we were holding for four Canadian banks against those banks’ own filings. The figures disagreed with the filings by between 3.6% and 8.7%. They had come from an aggregator.
That is the entire origin of the rule. We were holding numbers that did not match what the banks themselves had published. So now, for anything a company reports about itself, we open the company’s own document first.
Where Our Technical Levels Come From
Every technical level we publish is read off TradingView, on stocks and on crypto alike. That covers moving averages and crossovers, support and resistance, volume profile, anchored VWAP and trend structure. The reason is that TradingView is a chart the reader can open and check for themselves, which a level computed privately on our machine is not.
So we do not publish a level we calculated here as though it were the level. Where we do compute something adjacent, we label it for exactly what it is, for example “the 365 day anchored VWAP we calculate from daily closes”. And when our own calculation disagrees with the chart, the piece is held rather than published on our figure.
That rule has held a piece. An anchored VWAP computed here from price data put Bitcoin’s line at $83,422 USD against roughly $81,000 USD on the chart. That is a gap of roughly $2,400 USD on the single number the piece was built around, so the piece was held rather than published on our own figure. A level nobody else can see is not a level. It is an opinion with decimal places.
Where Rates, Limits and Official Data Come From
Rates, limits and official statistics come from the body that sets or produces them, and we link that body so the reader can land on the primary release:
- The Bank of Canada for the policy rate, the daily USD/CAD rate and Government of Canada bond yields, taken from its Valet API.
- Statistics Canada for CPI and the labour force numbers, taken from its WDS API and its published release calendar.
- The Canada Revenue Agency for contribution limits and tax rules.
- The US Treasury and TreasuryDirect for the yield curve and auction results.
The rule underneath that list: never a news summary of a rate when the rate itself is published. A policy rate, a CPI print and a contribution limit are all published by the institution that owns them. Quoting somebody’s article about the release instead of the release adds a step that can only subtract accuracy.
What We Do With Aggregators and Competitors
Where an aggregator’s data is used, we credit it in plain text and we do not link out to it. Those sites compete with us for the same queries, and a link is authority handed to a competitor plus an exit handed to the reader. For the same reason we do not link competing publishers or comparison sites at all.
What we do instead is link the original. If a competitor republished something, the link goes to the wire service, the company’s own release, or the agency that produced the data. If the original is not linkable, the credit stays as plain text and no link appears. Unlinked credit is honest.
The line we will not cross is re-crediting a figure to a different source to make a link acceptable. The figure came from where it came from. If we want a linkable source, we go and find the number again in that source rather than quietly changing the label on the one we already have.
How the site is funded, and how that funding is kept separate from what gets published, is set out in our editorial policy.
How We Date a Number
Financial figures go stale, so every one of them carries a “data as of” qualifier. A price without a date is not information.
Crypto prices are labelled as snapshots rather than closes, because crypto trades continuously and there is no close to quote. Where a price is a live, unfinished bar, we say so rather than dressing an intraday number up as a settled one. Evergreen pages get refreshed when their data goes stale, in place, rather than being left to rot or deleted.
How a Piece Gets Built
Research comes first and writing comes second, in that order, deliberately.
Facts are gathered and written to a sourced fact sheet before any prose exists, with each figure carrying the document it came from. The article is then written from that sheet. A claim that cannot be traced back to a line on it does not survive to publication, which is a blunt instrument and is meant to be. It removes the temptation to reach for the plausible sentence that nothing actually supports.
Where a second independent source exists for a figure, the figure is cross-checked against it, and a disagreement is resolved before publishing rather than averaged. Averaging two sources is a way of publishing a number that neither of them says.
Here is what a clean check looks like. On a recent crypto piece, a TradingView price of 0.18512 USDT converted at the Bank of Canada USD/CAD rate of 1.4136 gave $0.2617 CAD, which was within 0.30% of the independent figure we were already holding. Two paths to the same number, arrived at separately, is the check. When they do not meet, the work is not finished.
What We Do Not Do
- We do not quote a company financial from an aggregator.
- We do not publish a technical level we cannot point at on a chart.
- We do not fabricate quotes, data or attribution.
- We do not take a number from the extracted text of an investor presentation, because slide layout scrambles which label belongs to which value. Decks are used for management commentary only.
- We do not describe any security as a guaranteed winner.
When We Get Something Wrong
When something is wrong we fix the article itself rather than leaving the error in place and appending a note elsewhere. If you spot one, tell us through the contact page.
What We Are Not
We are not a portfolio manager, an investment advisor or a financial planner, and nothing here is personalised advice. What this site publishes is general information and opinion, which cannot account for your income, your tax situation, your timeline or your tolerance for losing money on a position.
Disclaimer: The content on bestcanadianstocks.ca is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.