Editorial Code

§Preamble

Hunch exists to bring clarity to a world saturated with information that is wrong, repetitive, or designed to manipulate.

Our readers want two things from the news cycle. They want to test their convictions against reality — to know whether what they already believe is true. And they want to discover the parts of a story that the headlines missed, the precedents that the commentary did not surface, the patterns that arrange themselves only when someone takes the time to look.

We serve both motives with the same product. We do this through Echo — an analytical unit that pairs a current event with the historical patterns that explain it, and from which prediction markets are derived. The markets are not the point. The markets are a measurement instrument that turns conviction into something accountable.

The medium we have chosen is unusual. Prediction markets attract the worst impulses as readily as the best ones: the impulse to enrich oneself through information asymmetry, the impulse to manipulate sentiment for political ends, the impulse to drown legitimate analysis in noise. We are aware of these risks and have built the company to resist them — through editorial discipline, through transparent algorithms, through structural separations between commercial interest and analytical output, and through the rules that follow in this document.

Information purity is the higher goal. Everything in this Code serves it.

§Section 1Editorial Independence

Editorial decisions at Hunch are made by editors. Commercial considerations — including sponsorship, partnerships, advertising, and the platform's own revenue streams — do not determine which Echoes we publish, what patterns we identify, or what markets we derive.

Specifically:

• Sponsored content (Paid Echo) is structurally separated from organic editorial. A sponsor of a Paid Echo commissions the topic, sees the draft for factual correction, and is named in a clearly visible label. The sponsor does not write, edit, or approve the analysis. The sponsor cannot prevent publication once commissioned; if a sponsor withdraws before publication, Hunch may publish the same Echo as organic content with no obligation to the sponsor.
• Hunch's own markets are not editorial subjects. We do not publish analyses that exist to drive volume to a specific market we have a financial interest in beyond the standard service fee that applies to all markets uniformly.
• No politician, party, lobby group, or commercial entity exercises veto over a Hunch Echo. Subjects of analysis may request factual corrections through the published process (see §7); they have no other channel of influence.

A reader who suspects this principle has been compromised may file a complaint through the process in §9. Such complaints are answered by the founder-editor personally until an independent ombudsperson is appointed (see §11).

§Section 2Automation and Human Sign-off

Parts of our pipeline are automated. This section sets out which parts, which parts are not, and what a reader can check.

2.1 What is automated

• Continuous scanning of the publications on our source list.
• Selection of events that meet our publication criteria: a binary outcome, a verifiable source, a concrete resolution date.
• Retrieval of comparable precedents from our historical record, which becomes the first draft of the pattern block.
• Proposed resolution criteria and source URLs for each market.
• Resolution of markets whose outcome is a published figure, with a second-source check where the reading is not unambiguous and a cancel-and-refund path where it cannot be settled.

2.2 What is never automated

• Publication. No Echo goes out without an editor's review and approval.
• Forecasting on our own markets. Hunch and its systems never take a position.
• Persuasion. We do not produce content designed to move sentiment in a direction.
• Sourcing from private, leaked or paywalled material to assert a fact. Only public, citable sources qualify.
• Inventing precedent. Every case in an Echo corresponds to a real, sourced event.

2.3 What readers can check

• Every claim carries its source. The precedents behind a pattern are listed with theirs.
• Patterns show the cases that held and the cases that did not. We do not curate away counter-examples.
• Where a market resolves on a published figure, that figure and its source are shown with the resolution.
• A correction names what went wrong, whether the error was made by a person or by an automated step (§4). Nothing is attributed to a system update.

2.4 Allegations against named parties

Where an Echo states or implies that a named company, organisation or individual has done something unlawful, dishonest or improper, it is published only where the allegation rests on at least two primary sources: a court record, a regulator's notice, an official report, a parliamentary record, or the party's own published statement. Reporting by another outlet is not a primary source for this purpose. If two primary sources do not exist, the Echo is not published, however strong the pattern. The subject may use the right of reply in Section 7.

§Section 3Information Purity and Source Standards

Every Echo is grounded in primary sources. The standard is:

• Three to five primary sources per Echo, identified explicitly and accessible to the reader where possible.
• Source hierarchy: statutory and parliamentary publications (Hansard, legislation.gov.uk), official statistical releases (ONS, BoE, DMO), regulatory publications (Ofcom, FCA, UKGC, Ofgem), Electoral Commission filings — before secondary commentary.
• Editorial commentary (Bloomberg, FT, The Economist, broadsheet op-eds) may be cited as context, never as the source of a factual claim.
• Tabloid and social-media reporting may be cited as a signal that a story is in circulation, never as a source of fact.

When a fact cannot be sourced to the above standard, it does not enter an Echo. Speculation framed as fact is the exact information pollution we exist to push back against.

Hunch is a complement to journalism, not a substitute. The reporting produced by broadsheet publications — including the Financial Times, The Times, The Guardian, and The Economist — is essential context for the work we do. Our citations of it are visible, our links to it are generous, and we never republish or rewrite. Where our analysis builds on a reporter's work, we say so plainly and send our readers to read the original. We compete with no one on the speed of journalism; we offer something different — historical pattern depth, and a measurement instrument for conviction.

§Section 4Accuracy and Corrections

When an Echo contains a factual error, we correct it. The standard process is:

• Errors are corrected at the source — the Echo is edited to remove the inaccuracy.
• A correction note is published at the top of the Echo identifying what was wrong, what is now correct, and the date of the correction.
• The original version is preserved in an edit log accessible from the Echo footer.
• Where the error affected the resolution of a market, the market is re-resolved or refunded, and affected participants are notified directly.

There is no shame in a correction. There is shame in concealing one.

A correction names what went wrong, whether the error was made by a person or by an automated step. Nothing is quietly attributed to “a system update.”

§Section 5Market Integrity and Insider-Trading Prevention

Hunch operates prediction markets as a measurement instrument for conviction. The integrity of those markets is therefore an editorial concern as much as a commercial one.

We commit to the following protections:

• Short resolution windows — most markets run between one and thirty days. Long-horizon markets create insider opportunity; we avoid them.
• Public resolution sources only — every market resolves against an officially published outcome (Hansard, legislation.gov.uk, ONS, BoE, gov.uk). We do not resolve against "sources say" reporting or leaked documents.
• Volume limits per market per user — individual exposure to a single market is capped to make insider extraction uneconomic. Specific caps are published.
• Anomaly detection — sharp shifts in conviction combined with large positions from new accounts are flagged for human review. Suspect activity is suspended pending investigation.
• Time-weighted scoring — predictions made earlier (when uncertainty was higher) carry more reputational weight than late predictions. This rewards genuine insight, not late-stage insider knowledge.
• Algorithmic transparency — readers have access to the same historical record our systems draw on. Nothing in an Echo rests on data a reader cannot see.

A platform that profits from prediction is structurally tempted to ignore manipulation. Hunch will not.

§Section 6Conflicts of Interest

The following rules bind everyone employed by, contracted to, or holding equity in Hunch:

• No trading on Hunch markets by Hunch staff, contractors, board members, or material equity holders.
• No directing of family members to trade on Hunch markets on their behalf.
• Personal political donations and party memberships must be disclosed to the founder-editor. They do not disqualify staff from working on any topic, but they are kept on file and may be cited in a published byline if the conflict is material.
• Outside writing or commentary by Hunch staff on political topics covered by Hunch must be disclosed. Hunch retains the right to require a disclosure note on the external piece.
• Gifts, hospitality, and paid travel from any party with an interest in markets we cover must be declined or reported.

The same rules apply to our systems: they cannot be augmented with data feeds, weights or tuning that introduce an undeclared bias, and training sources are documented.

§Section 7Right of Reply

Subjects of an Echo — politicians, organisations, public officials, and named private individuals — may request factual corrections through a published process. We commit to:

• A response from a named editor within five working days of receipt.
• Correction at source where a factual error is established, under §4.
• A right of reply published below the Echo where a subject contests a characterisation we have made about them, even if no factual error is identified, and we judge the matter to be of material public interest.
• No editing of the published Echo to remove material on commercial or relationship grounds outside of this process.

We do not extend right of reply to anonymous parties or to entities seeking to suppress legitimate analysis.

§Section 8Privacy and Subjects of Analysis

The default for Hunch coverage is the political and economic public sphere — actions of public officials in their public capacity, votes recorded in Parliament, statements made on the record, decisions published by regulators. Private life is not Hunch's subject.

• Named private individuals appear only where directly material (e.g. a named donor whose role is publicly documented). They are subject to the same right of reply (§7).
• Vulnerable persons — children, persons in distress, persons under investigation but not charged — are not subjects of Echo coverage unless an overriding public interest is identified and explicitly noted.
• Subjects of prediction markets that resolve based on personal events (e.g. a resignation, a court appearance) require an editor's explicit judgement that the market is in the public interest and based on publicly verifiable resolution criteria.

We do not run markets on the private lives of private individuals.

§Section 9Complaints

A reader who believes Hunch has fallen short of this Code may file a complaint via:

• Email: info@readhunch.com
• Contact form: the contact page

We commit to:

• Acknowledgement within two working days.
• A substantive response from a named editor within ten working days.
• An escalation path: if the complainant is not satisfied with the editor's response, the complaint may be escalated to the founder-editor (initially Pavlo Denysiuk), and from the appointment of an independent ombudsperson (see §11), to that ombudsperson.

Complaints, anonymised, are reported in aggregate in Hunch's annual transparency report.

§Section 10Algorithmic Transparency

In addition to §2, Hunch publishes:

• The list of news sources monitored by our scanning system.
• The list of resolution sources used by our auto-resolution engine.
• The confidence thresholds (95% / 80%) and the actions triggered at each threshold.
• The historical database structure (event, year, category, outcome) — not every record is public, but the schema and the aggregate volume are.
• The volume, anomaly detection, and time-weighted scoring rules in summary form.

Where a reader requests further detail on a specific algorithmic decision — for example, "why were these three precedents surfaced and not other comparable ones?" — we commit to responding within ten working days where the underlying logic can be disclosed without compromising market integrity.

§Section 11Oversight

This Code is enforced by the founder-editor of Hunch. In Year 1 that is Pavlo Denysiuk. The founder-editor is accountable for every breach of this Code and for the integrity of every Echo published.

• From Year 2: Hunch will appoint a three-person Editorial Advisory Board including at least one member with a working background in UK political journalism or analysis, and at least one with a background in research ethics.
• From Year 3 (or earlier if growth permits): Hunch will appoint an independent ombudsperson with the authority to investigate complaints, publish findings, and require corrections under this Code.
• Annual transparency report: Hunch publishes an annual report identifying material errors corrected, complaints received and resolved, resolution accuracy, and any material breaches of this Code.

External accountability we may opt into as the company matures includes IPSO (Independent Press Standards Organisation) registration; we will consider that pathway once the company has a permanent editorial team beyond the founder.

Every person employed by, contracted to, or holding equity in Hunch is asked to read this Code at induction and to confirm their understanding of and commitment to it.