1. Mission and scope

FinNotes publishes editorial coverage of global capital markets — rates, FX, commodities, equities, credit, and macroeconomic policy. Our readership is professional and semi-professional: buy-side analysts, treasury and risk teams, financial journalists, and serious individual investors. Every piece on this site is written with the assumption that the reader can act on it.

Because financial coverage is YMYL ("Your Money or Your Life") content under Google's Quality Raters Guidelines, the bar we hold ourselves to on accuracy, sourcing, and attribution is intentionally higher than general news.

2. Sourcing and attribution

Every factual claim in a FinNotes article must be traceable to a primary or first-class secondary source. We work in three tiers:

• Tier 1 — primary. Central-bank press releases, regulator filings (SEC, ESMA, JFSA, CSRC), exchange data, sovereign debt-office issuance schedules, company 10-K / 20-F / annual reports, official statistics agencies.
• Tier 2 — first-class secondary. Reuters, Bloomberg, FT, WSJ, and on-record statements from named officials at central banks, finance ministries, and listed-company management.
• Tier 3 — analyst / desk colour. Sell-side research notes, buy-side commentary, anonymous market participants. These are clearly labelled and never stand alone — a Tier 3 claim that moves a price must be corroborated by Tier 1 or 2.

Direct quotation always names the speaker, their role, and the date. If a source requested anonymity, the article will explain why (e.g. "not authorised to speak publicly") so readers can weight the source themselves.

3. Editorial process

Every FinNotes article is subject to editorial review before publication. Our editorial process is designed to ensure that each story is accurate, clearly sourced and supported by relevant context. Writers are expected to verify factual claims, use reliable sources, distinguish confirmed information from developing information, and avoid presenting speculation as fact.

Before publication, editors review articles for factual accuracy, source quality, clarity, relevance and consistency with FinNotes' editorial standards. When a story relies on public releases, regulatory filings, official statements, company materials, economic data or external reporting, editors check that the article fairly reflects the underlying source material. For data-driven coverage, we also review the relevant figures, time periods, units and chart context where applicable.

Across the platform, this commitment is reflected in three main ways.

• Where possible, we provide source links. When an article cites public releases, regulatory filings, official statements or external news reports, we aim to list those references at the end of the article. Coverage based on independent reporting, editorial judgment or internal market signals may not always include external links; in those cases, the bylined writer and the editorial team remain responsible for the article's content.
• We add data and chart context where relevant. Articles may include related time-series data and embedded charts when they help readers understand the structure behind a market development, economic release or company event. This allows readers to examine relevant data without leaving the article.
• We connect related information. Each article may show related coverage, recent reading from the same editorial area and relevant data series, so readers can follow the broader context behind a headline rather than treating each story as an isolated update.

4. Institutional responsibility

FinNotes accepts responsibility for everything published under our masthead. The publisher — not the individual writer — is the accountable party. This is how mainstream financial publications operate, and we adopt the same model deliberately: editorial work is collective, errors are institutional, and corrections are owed to readers by the institution, not extracted from individuals.

In practice this means:

• Public accountability sits with FinNotes. Reader complaints, correction requests, source disputes and legal inquiries are handled by the FinNotes editorial team, not by the individual writer named in a byline. A byline identifies who produced a piece; it does not transfer the responsibility of publication.
• No public author profiles. We do not maintain individual author profile pages, public bios or external contact channels for editorial staff. This protects writers and editors from targeted harassment while preserving full accountability through the institution. Readers who need to reach the desk behind a piece can write to [email protected]; the team will respond on behalf of the author.
• Standards apply uniformly. The sourcing, accuracy, corrections and conflicts-of-interest commitments in this document apply equally to every piece we publish. There is no separate standard for any individual writer; the institutional commitment is the only one we make.

This model concentrates accountability rather than diluting it. If a FinNotes article gets something wrong, the address for that is FinNotes — and the correction lives on the article and in our public corrections log.

5. AI use policy

FinNotes operates a strict task-by-task division between humans and AI tools. Humans hold every step that involves judgement, verification or final responsibility. AI is used only for narrowly-scoped support tasks whose output is then checked by a human before anything reaches publication.

What humans do

• Decide which stories are worth covering and frame what each article should say.
• Gather and synthesise the information that goes into a piece, including which sources to consult and which data to consider.
• Verify every factual claim against a primary source. Verify every data point — figures, dates, periods, units, attribution — individually.
• Decide the final published version of every article. A piece is not considered finished until a named editor has signed off.
• Confirm before publication that the article contains no investment advice and no forecasts, and that the information is presented objectively.

Where AI may assist

• Producing first drafts from a human-prepared outline and source materials.
• Summarising official releases, regulatory filings, central-bank statements, earnings transcripts and similar source documents. The underlying text always remains available for human verification.
• Translating source documents from other languages. The original text is cross-checked by a human before any translated quote, figure or claim is used.

We do not generate fictional people, fictional quotes or fictional sources. We do not let AI invent numbers — every statistic is traced back to a primary source by a human. AI-generated text that has not been substantively edited and fact-checked by a human is never published.

When AI tools are used in research or drafting, the article does not label each instance. The editorial standard is that the final published article is the responsibility of the editorial team that produced it, regardless of which tools contributed to the draft.

Research column

The Research section contains long-form analytical pieces that may include some interpretation or analytical judgement. These pieces still carry no investment advice and no forecasts. Where a Research article presents an interpretive view rather than a purely descriptive account, that subjectivity is noted on the article itself, so readers can distinguish analysis from reporting.

6. Accuracy, corrections, and updates

If we publish an error of fact, we correct it. The correction is made inline in the article body, prefixed with a clear note ("Correction, 2026-05-28: ..."), and the article's dateModified is bumped so search engines and AI citation layers see the change. Significant corrections — anything affecting a headline claim, a price, or an attribution — are noted at the top of the article.

Substantive updates to an evolving story (new data, additional context) are noted with an "Updated" prefix on the affected paragraph. We do not silently rewrite prior coverage.

Errors of opinion or interpretation are not corrected; they may be addressed in a follow-up piece. We distinguish facts from views in our writing for this reason.

7. Conflicts of interest and disclosure

FinNotes writers and editors do not trade individual securities, currencies, or derivatives in any asset class they regularly cover. Permitted personal investments are: passively-managed broad-market index funds, sector ETFs that do not overlap with the writer's beat, and discretionary fund management where the writer does not direct individual position decisions.

This policy applies uniformly to every author and editor on the masthead. Individual disclosure statements are maintained internally and reviewed regularly. They are available on request from [email protected] to subjects of coverage, researchers, and regulators with a legitimate interest. The editorial commitment lives at the institutional level rather than the individual public profile — the work, its sources, and the byline-and-editor pairing are what readers see.

Commercial relationships (advertising, sponsored research, data-licensing partnerships) are disclosed in the article footer when they touch the subject matter. We do not publish coverage paid for by the subject of the coverage.

8. Independence and editorial firewall

The newsroom operates independently of FinNotes' commercial, sales, and subscription functions. Decisions about coverage — what to write, when to publish, how to frame — rest with the editorial team. Commercial staff do not see articles before they are published.

9. Diversity and inclusion

We actively recruit writers and editors from a range of geographies, sectoral backgrounds, and career stages. Coverage is strongest when the people producing it come from different vantage points — a US-rates story benefits from a writer who has lived through a different rate cycle, a China property piece benefits from on-the-ground perspective.

10. Reader feedback and contact

We welcome corrections, source tips, confidential sourcing and substantive criticism. Reach the editorial team at [email protected]. We acknowledge every correction request within one business day and respond with a decision within three. Communications expecting anonymity are handled accordingly.

11. AI and search-engine policy

We welcome indexing and citation by major search engines (Google, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo, Apple) and by named AI surfaces with public crawler identification (Anthropic's ClaudeBot, OpenAI's GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, Google's Google-Extended, xAI's Grok). Our robots.txt reflects this welcome list; all other automated crawlers are not authorised. When citing FinNotes content, please preserve byline attribution and link to the canonical URL.

12. Personal conduct and integrity

Beyond the structural rules in §6 (conflicts of interest) and §7 (editorial firewall), every FinNotes author and editor commits to a personal code of conduct in the practice of journalism:

• Truth and accuracy first. Fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism are immediate-cause grounds for dismissal. Direct quotations are verbatim; paraphrases are clearly distinguished; composite or hypothetical scenarios are explicitly labelled.
• Source protection. Promises of confidentiality given to a source are honoured under every circumstance, including reasonable personal cost. Identifying material — names, contact methods, voice recordings — is never shared outside the small group of editors required to verify the story.
• No personal use of non-public information. Information learned through reporting that has not been published may not be used for personal trading, shared with friends or family for their personal use, or used to advance personal positions in any market.
• Gifts and hospitality. Meals and travel of nominal value during routine reporting are accepted with disclosure to the editor. Anything above modest customary courtesy — paid travel, accommodations, gifts, event hospitality — is declined or pre-cleared with the editor-in-chief and disclosed in any resulting coverage.
• Outside engagements. Paid speaking engagements, advisory positions, board memberships, and external writing must be pre-approved by the editor-in-chief. Engagements that could create a conflict with the author's beat are not approved.
• Political and commercial independence. Authors do not publicly endorse political candidates, campaign for political parties, or hold positions that would constrain their professional independence in covering a beat. Personal political views are not published on FinNotes.
• Use of the platform. FinNotes' editorial reach is never used to settle personal disputes, advance individual financial positions, or pressure non-public people. Use of the masthead for personal commercial benefit is prohibited.

Suspected breaches of this code are escalated to the editor-in-chief. Material breaches are grounds for termination and are recorded in the corrections log when reader-facing.