Newsleaf The ask

One headline. Opposite trades.

“Iran threatens to close the Strait of Hormuz” lifts crude, LNG and tankers, and sinks airlines. Newsleaf tells investors which way each energy story pushes their holdings, every weekday at 06:00.

Read the morning issue The ask: $25,000

Example event · Day 1, 05:40 · 4 outlets

Crude oilLess oil may reach the market
LNGA fifth of LNG trade uses the strait
Crude tankersLonger routes, costlier insurance
AirlinesJet fuel gets more expensive

Energy news is loud, repetitive and out of date by Wednesday.

Investors holding oil, gas, shipping or airline positions read the same story again and again and still can’t tell which way it moves their positions.

Dozens of articles. One event.

One development produces dozens of near-identical stories. A reader can’t quickly tell a new development from the same story published again.

Bad news is not a direction.

Sentiment tools score the tone of a headline. “Iran threatens to close the Strait of Hormuz” scores as bad news. It raises crude prices and lowers airline shares.

Monday’s threat, Wednesday’s retraction.

News expires. A threat made on Monday can be withdrawn by Wednesday, and readers are left tracking which earlier stories still hold.

Brent +45%since the start of the war in Iran, as of May 2026

Before20.7 mb/d
A quarter later14.6 mb/d

Oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, million barrels a day · EIA via Transport Topics · EIA

The morning issue lists only what changed.

New, weakened, unchanged. Then which way each change pushes crude, LNG, tankers and airlines, with every item linked to the articles behind it.

Newsleaf · Day 3 · 06:00Sample data

Since the Day 2 issue

New
Iran and the US agree to reopen talks.Reported by 3 outlets
Weakened
The threat to close the Strait of Hormuz.First reported Day 1 · weakened by the talks
Unchanged
An offshore oil discovery.First reported Day 2 · found in an SEC filing
Crude oilUpward pressure, easing
LNGUpward pressure, easing
Crude tankersUpward pressure, easing
AirlinesDownward pressure, easing

One line per development. Overnight, Newsleaf pulls every new energy story, merges the duplicates and compares the result with the previous graph.

Direction comes with a reason. Each call names the event behind it and why it moves the price: jet fuel follows crude, and fuel is one of an airline’s largest costs.

Old stories fade. They don’t vanish. When talks undercut a threat, the issue says so, and the threat stays on record at a lower weight.

Search the graph

Answers questions about any topic, company, ticker or place, as of today or any earlier day.

How a headline becomes a direction.

Newsleaf keeps the news as a graph: events, the countries, companies and places involved, and the investments each event moves. Eight steps build it, shown here on the Hormuz story.

Collect

Six sources, watched around the clock. Nothing is thrown away.

01Watch

A watcher agent sits on each source and checks it on its own schedule. It keeps a bookmark at the last item it handed over, drops anything that isn’t about energy, and passes the rest to a run. When a story breaks, several watchers catch it within minutes and their items land in the same run.

The first run has no bookmarks, so everything each source shows goes in and becomes the first graph. Every run after that adds only what’s new. Bloomberg and the Financial Times are out of version 1: their terms forbid automated collection.

02Ingest

Every new article is stored exactly as fetched, with the fetch time. Nothing downstream edits the archive, so old articles can be reprocessed whenever extraction improves.

wire service · 04:12Iran threatens to close Strait of Hormuz
UK broadcaster · 04:31Tehran warns it could shut the strait
business daily · 04:50Oil jumps as Iran raises Hormuz threat
energy trade site · 05:21Hormuz threat puts tanker market on edge
stored unchanged
fetched 05:40
Article archive4 articles

Understand

From prose to a typed event, linked to the investments it moves.

03Extract and classify

A language model reads each article and marks who acted, what happened and where. A classifier tags its topics. This one is oil and shipping.

wire service · 04:12
whoIranwhat happenedthreatens to closewhereStrait of Hormuz
becomes a typed link
Iran
threatens to close
type: supply threat
Strait of Hormuz
matches topicsOilShipping

04Merge

Four outlets, one event. Articles about the same development merge and the outlet count is kept. “Tehran” joins “Iran”; “the strait” joins “Strait of Hormuz”.

wire service“Iran”, “Strait of Hormuz”
UK broadcaster“Tehran”, “the strait”
business daily“Iran”, “Hormuz”
energy trade site“Hormuz”
merge
Hormuz closure threat1 event · 4 outlets
whoIranalso “Tehran”
whereStrait of Hormuzalso “Hormuz”, “the strait”

05Link to investments

A table kept by the team maps each type of event to the investments it moves, the direction and the reason. A person reviews every link. A threat to Gulf supply moves four.

Hormuz closure threat
is a
Threat to Gulf supplyevent type
Crude oilLess oil may reach the market
LNGA fifth of LNG trade uses the strait
Crude tankersLonger routes, costlier insurance
AirlinesJet fuel gets more expensive

Remember

Every arrow knows when it was true. The graph can be replayed to any morning.

06Store with time

Each link becomes an arrow carrying its direction, the day the event happened, the moment Newsleaf learned of it, and a weight that fades with age. For this type of event it halves every 14 days.

Arrows are never edited or deleted. A later story that weakens an earlier one is a new arrow between the two.

Hormuz closure threat4 outlets
pushes up
Crude oil
stored on this arrow
Happened
Day 1
Learned
Day 1, 05:40
Weight
Day 1 · fullDay 8Day 15 · half

07Delta

After each run Newsleaf lists what it added and what it weakened. That list is the delta, and it is what the morning issue is made of.

Hormuz closure threatDay 1, 05:40 · 4 outlets new weakened Offshore discoveryDay 2, 04:30 · 2 outlets new Iran–US talksDay 3, 03:50 · 3 outlets new Crude oilup, easing; slowly down LNGup, easing Crude tankersup, easing Airlinesdown, easing
  • pushes up
  • pushes down
  • slow effect
  • weakened
  • weakens

    08Publish

    At 06:00 on weekdays an editor checks the delta and it goes out as the issue. Search reads the whole graph, at any hour.

    Graph
    Deltasince the last issue
    Editorreviews it
    Issueweekdays, 06:00
    Graphall of it
    Searchany time

    Others sell scores or opinions. Newsleaf sells a record.

    Every direction Newsleaf publishes is logged and scored against the price move that followed. The scorecard is public.

    News analytics feeds

    For example
    RavenPack, Bloomberg’s news sentiment data
    Sold to
    Funds with quantitative analysts
    The buyer gets
    Scores and data feeds for building trading models
    Checked by
    The buyer’s own backtests

    Paid energy newsletters

    For example
    Doomberg, Energy Outlook Advisors
    Sold to
    Individual investors
    The buyer gets
    One writer’s analysis
    Checked by
    Usually nobody, systematically

    Newsleaf

    Sold to
    Individual investors and financial advisers
    The buyer gets
    A daily list of changes, with a direction for each affected investment
    Checked by
    Anyone, on the public scorecard

    Priced under the incumbents until the record earns more.

    Newsleaf starts below the energy newsletters because it has no track record yet. The price rises once the scorecard covers a full year.

    $300 a yearor $30 a month, sold through Substack

    After Substack’s 10% fee and card fees, each $300 subscription pays Newsleaf about $259.

    Large general Substacks
    $50–220
    Newsleaf
    $300
    Doomberg
    $400
    Energy Outlook Advisorsdaily report, 2023 price
    $420
    Doomberg Pro
    $1,200

    Forty annual subscribers cover the running costs.

    0Launch
    40Covers ~$10,200 a year in data, models and hosting from year two
    100Month-12 target, about $25,900 a year

    Build plan

    1. Months 1–3The weekday issue

      Watchers, archive, extraction, merging, the graph and the delta. The team writes each issue’s investment links by hand.

      TestsDoes it catch the stories that move prices, and will readers pay?

    2. Months 4–6A public scorecard

      The event-type table, and a log scoring every published direction against the price move that followed.

      TestsHow often the directions are right.

    3. Months 7–12Search for subscribers

      Search over the live graph.

      TestsDo subscribers come back between issues?

    4. After month 12Data for funds

      A feed of the graph’s full history, sold per contract, and a second sector.

      TestsDoes the stored history sell on its own?

    $25,000

    for the first twelve months.

    It covers data, models, hosting, legal work and the first subscribers while the weekday issue, the scorecard and search are built.

    • News data$5,388

      NewsAPI.org Business plan at $449 a month

    • Model usage$3,000

      $250 a month. Extracting 1,000 articles a day costs about $3.50 on Claude Haiku 4.5; the rest writes issues and runs search

    • Hosting and database$1,800

      About $150 a month

    • Legal$5,000

      A founders’ agreement and a securities lawyer’s review of the issue and search

    • First subscribers$6,000

      Free trials and advertising aimed at energy investors

    • Contingency$3,812

      About 15%

    Sairam Krishnan

    Product and technical lead

    Designed the architecture and the build plan. Builds the product.

    Katera Mujadidi

    CFO and venture capital specialist

    Originated the Newsleaf idea.

    The graph starts recording on the first run. Every later product sells that history.