News sentiment and social sentiment are not interchangeable. News tone reflects institutional and editorial framing — slower, more vetted, and closer to fundamentals. Social sentiment reflects retail mood — faster, noisier, and closer to momentum and positioning.
Each leads in different situations. Social sentiment often moves first on retail-driven names and meme stocks; news sentiment leads on earnings, regulation, and macro events where reporting drives the narrative. Trusting the wrong source for the situation is a common, avoidable error.
The strongest signals appear when the two agree. When news tone and social mood both turn bullish on a name, conviction is broad-based; when they diverge, one crowd knows something the other does not — and that divergence is worth investigating before you trade.
Sintinel scores news and social streams separately and then blends them into the composite, so you can see both the consensus and where the two crowds disagree.