PTC Data Sources

This page is the umbrella description of the source families PTC uses across firm dossiers, company timelines, rankings, the PTC Risk Monitor™ and PTC Estimates™. It explains what kinds of sources exist and how they are treated. How a specific model consumes them remains governed by that model's own methodology page.

Source philosophy

PTC combines firm-published information, public records, independent publications, third-party market data, public review and community signals, and internally derived research. Not every source is equally strong, and no source is published as fact simply because it exists: each is recorded with its type, its role and — where applicable — its reliability.

Registered source

Sources are catalogued, not ad hoc

PTC maintains an internal registry of source families with a type, coverage note, whether the source is an official one, whether it requires a commercial subscription, and a default reliability weight. Research and events reference these families rather than free-text provenance.

Evidence, not authority

A source supports a claim

A source can anchor, bound, corroborate or merely contextualise a published figure or finding. The strength of the source determines which of those roles it is allowed to play.

Source hierarchy

Production classifies sources into tiers, and that tier governs what a finding may be used for. Simplified for public presentation, the hierarchy is:

Tier 1 — official: Firm-published documentation (official websites, terms and conditions, FAQs and help centres, firm announcements) and government sources — company registries and regulator records. Strongest evidence; can anchor a material claim on its own.
Tier 2 — high quality: Credible financial and industry publications with editorial accountability, and corporate/company databases. Usable for material claims, normally alongside or in corroboration of official sources.
Tier 3 — secondary: Other third-party reporting, prop-firm aggregators and listing sites, and public review platforms. Usable as a lead, a signal, or corroboration — not as the sole basis for a material published claim.
Community: Public social channels and trader/community submissions, including reports sent through PTC intake. Treated as research signal; requires review and corroboration before it can support a substantive published claim.

Alongside tier, each record carries a verification state — verified, corroborated, single-source, unverified or disputed. Corroborated means more than one independent source supports the same claim. Single-source and unverified records are held to a higher editorial bar before publication.

Official firm sources

The primary evidence base for what a firm actually offers and how it operates.

Official firm websites, product and pricing pages.
Terms and conditions, trading rules and account agreements.
FAQs and help centres, which frequently carry rule detail not present on marketing pages.
Firm announcements and firm-owned channels, including published payout disclosures and payout dashboards where a firm operates one.

Firm-published statements are recorded as disclosures with their date and wording. A disclosure is authoritative about what the firm has said; it is not automatically accepted as an audited fact about the firm's scale. Where a disclosure enters a model, the model methodology states whether it acts as an anchor, a floor or a ceiling.

Public records and independent publications

Used to establish corporate identity, structure, history and materially reported events.

Registries: Company registries and regulator/filing records for the firm's operating entities — the highest-reliability sources in the registry, used for incorporation, entity names, jurisdiction and status.
Publications: Financial and prop-industry publications with editorial accountability, used for dated events such as launches, closures, acquisitions, funding and regulatory action.
Company databases: Third-party corporate/company-data providers, used for corporate context and as corroboration rather than as a primary anchor.

Market and audience data

Third-party commercial datasets provide the market-scale signals behind rankings and estimates. PTC describes these inputs by what they measure rather than by vendor.

Search demand: Branded and category search volumes, keyword coverage and search-visibility measures, at global and country level.
Audience scale: Independent estimates of website and audience scale, used as a relative scale signal across firms — never as a headcount.
Public search trends: Publicly available search-trend data, used for direction and geography rather than absolute levels.
Social presence: Public social channel presence, used as a brand-reach signal only. Missing social data is recorded as missing, not as zero.

These datasets are themselves estimates produced by third parties. PTC normalises them within a comparable cohort of firms, so they express relative standing rather than absolute truth. Some of these providers are commercial subscriptions and some are publicly available — PTC does not claim that every third-party dataset it uses is licensed, nor that any single measure is sourced from multiple providers.

Review and community signals

Public review data is used as an observable participation and reputation signal, not as proof of firm quality or reliability.

Used: Public review rating, total public review count, and change in review volume over time (review velocity).
Not used: PTC does not run automated sentiment analysis or machine classification of review text, and does not publish a review-text sentiment score. Complaint themes reach PTC only through structured research and editorial review, not through automated text scoring.
Interpretation: Review volume is largely a function of a firm's size and marketing reach, so it is normalised against comparable firms before use. A high rating is not treated as evidence that payouts or rules are honoured.

Aggregator and listing sites are used as leads and corroboration only. Public social channels are Community-tier evidence and cannot on their own support a material claim about a firm.

Trader reports

Trader and community submissions are a research input, not a publication channel.

A submission through PTC intake is recorded in a private editorial queue with a pending review state and is not publicly visible.
Submission is not verification. A report becomes usable for a substantive published claim only after editorial review and corroboration against stronger evidence.
Reports are most valuable as direction: a cluster of similar reports can trigger research into a firm even when no single report is publishable.
Where a report leads to a published finding, the published claim rests on the corroborating evidence, not on the submission itself.

How sources become published data

Source data is not the same thing as a PTC output. Published values carry a provenance class that states what kind of data they are.

Observed: Directly measured or recorded data.
PTC Estimate: Modelled values based on a disclosed PTC methodology.
Derived: Calculated from PTC datasets, rankings or published snapshots.
Research Finding: Evidence-backed findings from PTC research.

Direct evidence: A disclosed or recorded fact published as it stands. Observed
Research finding: An evidence-backed conclusion from structured research and editorial review. Research Finding
Model input: A normalised signal feeding a disclosed model, whose output is an estimate with a range. PTC Estimate
Calibration, bound or corroboration: Evidence used to calibrate a cohort, to raise a lower bound, to cap an upper bound, or to confirm another source — without itself becoming a published number.
Calculated from PTC data: A figure computed from PTC datasets, rankings or published snapshots. Derived

Evidence already used at one stage of the pipeline is not reused as independent confirmation at another. See the Estimate Methodology, Ranking Methodology and the individual model pages for the exact rules.

Conflicting and incomplete evidence

Conflicts are resolved by evidence strength, not by counting how many sources say the same thing.

Stronger evidence wins: an official or registry source outranks secondary reporting on the same question.
Where credible sources genuinely disagree, the uncertainty is preserved — as a wider range, a lower confidence grade, or a claim recorded as disputed.
Material claims can be held for further research or editorial review rather than published on the balance of weak sources.
Missing data is recorded as missing. A signal with no observation is excluded from normalisation rather than treated as zero.
Where a claim cannot be corroborated, it is either published as single-source with that limitation visible, or not published.

Freshness and limitations

Source families refresh on different rhythms, and some refresh only when PTC deliberately runs them.

Automated: Search-demand collection runs on an automated monthly schedule at global and country level.
On change: Official firm documentation and registry records are re-checked when a change is identified or a firm is researched — PTC does not operate a continuous or weekly automated diff of every firm's rules, FAQs and changelogs.
Deliberate runs: Structured firm research, event research, model executions and publication baselines are analyst-initiated, dated and versioned rather than run on a fixed calendar.
Known limits: Coverage reflects PTC's tracked market rather than every firm in existence; third-party market datasets carry their own error; review and community data skew toward larger and more marketed firms; and a source recorded at one date may have changed since.