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. Author credentials and byline policy

Every FinNotes article is published under a real byline. Bylines link to a public author page that lists the writer's coverage areas, professional background, and verifiable external profiles (LinkedIn). Pseudonymous or fully-anonymous bylines are not permitted.

Author pages also publish a personal disclosure statement (see Section 6). Editors review every byline at hire and annually thereafter for ongoing E-E-A-T compliance.

4. AI use policy

We treat AI assistance the way we treat a junior analyst: useful for first drafts, data lookups, and summarisation, but never the final author of a published piece. Every article on FinNotes is reviewed by a named human editor before publication. AI-generated drafts that have not been substantively edited and fact-checked by a human are not published.

We do not generate fictional people, fictional quotes, or fictional sources. We do not let an AI invent numbers; every statistic is verified against a primary source.

When AI tools are used in research or drafting, the article does not need to label each instance — the editorial standard is that the final published article is the responsibility of the named human author and editor, regardless of which tools contributed to the draft.

5. 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.

6. 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. To protect personal privacy without weakening the standard, individual disclosure statements are maintained internally and verified annually. They are available on request from [email protected] to subjects of coverage, researchers, and regulators with a legitimate interest. Author profile pages therefore display coverage areas and credentials, not granular personal holdings — the editorial commitment lives at the institutional level.

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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. Reader feedback and contact

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

10. 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.

11. 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.