Sources, ranked

Before you judge whether a piece of information is true, ask a simpler question that most people skip: where did it come from, and how many hands did it pass through to reach me?

Here is the picture to hold in your head for this whole book. A fact about a company starts life in one place — a document the company or the regulator actually filed. From there it travels. A company officer talks about it on a call. An analyst writes a note about the call. A news channel makes a headline out of the note. Someone clips the headline into a WhatsApp forward. By the time it lands in your phone as "BUY this, target +30%", it has passed through five or six people — and every one of them wanted something from you along the way. illustrative

That is the core idea of this module. Information is not equally trustworthy just because it reached you. It gets a little less true, and a little more shaped to make you act, at every hand. So the first defence is not cleverness. It is knowing the order of your sources — which ones sit close to the truth and which ones sit close to your wallet — and always trying to climb one rung closer to the source.

Why does a fact rot as it travels? Two things get added at each hand, and both work against you.

A payer gets added. Ask of any message: who profits if you believe this? The company officer wants the stock to look good. The sell-side analyst — an analyst paid by a firm that earns when you trade or invest — wants you engaged. The news channel wants you to keep watching. The tip sender may already own the stock and want you to buy so it rises. None of these people are necessarily lying. But each one has a reason to nudge the fact, and the nudges stack up. This is what we mean by a payer: someone standing between you and the fact who benefits from how you react to it.

A delay gets added. It takes time for a fact to be talked about, written up, broadcast and forwarded. So the further down the chain a source sits, the older its information usually is — and in markets, old information is often information the price has already moved on. By the time a "hot tip" reaches a stranger's phone, the people at the top of the chain have had days, sometimes weeks, to act on it first.

Put those together and you get a simple rule. The best source is the one with the fewest payers between you and the fact, and the shortest delay — which almost always means the original document itself. Everything else is a retelling, and a retelling is worth reading only if it points you back to the thing it retold.

Here is the ranking. Read it from the top: each rung down adds at least one more payer and a little more delay, so each rung down is a little less trustworthy — not because the people are worse, but because the information has travelled further from where it was true.

Walk down the rungs with a plain eye.

Rung 1 — Company filings and regulatory orders. This is the primary source: the original document, before anyone summarised it. When a company wins an order, it files a regulatory filing — a disclosure it is legally required to submit to the exchange — and that filing is public within minutes on the NSE and BSE websites. When the regulator SEBI penalises someone, it publishes an order you can read yourself. There is no payer between you and these; the company's lawyers wrote them knowing SEBI is watching. This is the rung you decide on.

Rung 2 — The concall and its transcript. Each quarter, management holds a concall — a conference call where they present results and take analysts' questions — and a written transcript appears soon after. This is close to the source: it is management's own words. But now one payer has entered. Management chooses which words to use, and they are selling their own story. Excellent to read; read it knowing who is speaking.

Rung 3 — The analyst report. An analyst reads the filing and the concall for you and hands you a verdict — often a rating and a price target, their guess of where the price will be in a year. That is real work and can be genuinely useful. But two payers now sit in the chain: management's spin, plus the analyst's own reasons to keep you engaged. And you are reading their reading, not the document.

Rung 4 — Business media. TV channels and news sites turn all of the above into something watchable. Their job is not to be complete; it is to hold your attention. A ₹120 crore order with undisclosed margins becomes "Company bags mega order!" The fact is in there, but it has been shaped for the eye, and a third payer — the channel's need for viewers — has been added.

Rung 5 — Social feeds and tip groups. At the bottom sits the tip — a bare "buy this now" with no reasoning attached — and the endless churn of posts and forwards. The most hands have touched it, the reasoning has been stripped out, the payers are many and often hidden, and it reaches you last, after the people at the top have already acted. This rung is where the least trustworthy information lives, and, not by accident, where most beginners spend the most time.

Watch the ladder decide a real-feeling case. illustrative

Ravi gets a forward in a stock group: "XYZ Ltd bags huge govt order, ₹120 cr — BUY before Monday, easy 30%." His pulse quickens. It feels like a gift, and the clock feels like it is ticking.

Notice where this message sits: the very bottom rung. It has no reasoning, a tidy target, an urgent deadline, and it reached Ravi through who-knows-how-many hands. The one thing it does contain — the "₹120 cr" — is checkable. So instead of acting on the tip, Ravi climbs the ladder. He opens the NSE announcements page, finds XYZ's own filing, and reads it. The order is real, but it is spread over three years, the margin is not disclosed, and the company already flagged that a big chunk of its receivables from government contracts is stuck. The exciting number survived the trip; every caveat that made it mean something did not.

That is the whole method in one move. Go to the primary source did not tell Ravi whether to buy — that is not its job. It told him what the tip had quietly deleted, so that his decision could be made on the fact instead of the feeling. And the deadline? A real, multi-year order does not expire on Monday. Urgency is a property of the seller, not the business.

This is also signal separated from noise in its simplest form: the forward was almost all noise (urgency, a round target, a deadline) wrapped around one small grain of signal (an order exists) — and the only way to find the grain was to climb to the rung where the noise had not yet been added.

The ladder is a guide to where to look first, not a promise. It has real limits, and pretending otherwise is its own trap.

It does not make the top rung automatically true. A company's own filing is written by people with an interest in looking good; within the law, they choose what to emphasise and what to bury in a footnote. Primary does not mean unbiased — it means closest to the source and hardest to quietly distort. You still have to read it with your eyes open. That is the whole next module.

It does not make lower rungs worthless. A good journalist or analyst sometimes surfaces things no filing spells out — a pattern across companies, a question management dodged. The rule is not "never read them." It is "let them point you, then verify on a higher rung before you act."

And it cannot rank within a rung for you. Two analyst reports are not equally good; two news outlets are not equally careful. The ladder sorts types of source by how many hands touch them. Judging one source against another of the same type is a separate skill this book keeps building.

The same handful of slips send beginners to the wrong rung. Named once, they are easy to catch.

1. Counting voices instead of sources. Three people saying the same thing feels like three confirmations. Usually it is one story that started on a higher rung and rolled downhill, picking up mouths but not facts. Ask: are these independent, or is this an echo?

2. Mistaking speed for value. The fastest source to reach you is usually the one with the most hands on it, made easy to forward. Fast down the ladder means late in the real chain — you are hearing it after the people who could act already did.

3. Deciding on the retelling. Reading the headline or the analyst's rating and stopping there. The retelling is where the caveats go to die. If a fact is worth acting on, it is worth reading on the rung where it was still whole.

4. Treating a precise target as proof of rigour. "Target +30%" sounds researched. A specific number attached to no reasoning is the opposite of rigour — it is confidence manufactured to make you act. Precision is not evidence.

5. Letting urgency set the rung. "Buy before Monday" pushes you to skip the climb. Real business facts rarely expire on a deadline; deadlines are a feature of the person selling, not of the company.