1. The wall between editorial and advertising
StocksAce sells advertising, including sponsored content paid for by public companies. This is the standard that keeps that from contaminating what you read.
| Rule | In practice |
|---|---|
| Editorial is not purchasable | No payment buys a mention, inclusion, or favourable treatment in a guide, tool, glossary entry or editorial email. There is no rate for it. |
| Advertisers get no preview | Advertisers, sponsors and affiliated businesses do not see, review or approve editorial content before publication, and cannot request changes after it. |
| Paid material is visually distinct | It lives at a /sponsored/ URL, carries a red disclosure box above the content, and is not styled to resemble a guide. |
| The disclosure is automatic | Generated from the deal record at build time. A sponsored page cannot be published without a complete Section 17(b) disclosure attached. |
| Never our byline | Sponsored material never appears under the StocksAce editorial byline and is never described as our analysis. |
| Declining is always available | A paid order does not oblige publication. See our advertising standards. |
2. Sourcing
- Primary sources first. SEC filings from EDGAR, exchange listing rules, FINRA rules, and regulator publications — not a secondary summary of them.
- Named thresholds get checked against the rule. When we cite a figure like the $1.00 minimum bid price or the $75 million baby-shelf threshold, it comes from the rule, not from another article.
- Vendor data is labelled as vendor data. Float estimates, short interest and fundamental fields all carry known limitations, and we state them at the point of use rather than in a disclaimer nobody reads.
- No unverifiable statistics. If we can't point to where a number comes from, it doesn't go in.
3. What we will not do
Some of these are ordinary journalistic hygiene. Several are specific to this sector, because they're the practices that make small-cap media untrustworthy.
- No invented track records. We publish no performance claims, model portfolios, or back-tested results — ours or anyone's.
- No fake reviews or testimonials. We do not write reviews of ourselves, solicit them under false pretences, or publish testimonials we didn't receive.
- No invented people. We don't publish under fabricated author identities with stock photos and invented CVs. See the byline section below.
- No inflated audience numbers. Not on the site, not in a media kit, not in an advertiser conversation.
- No urgency manufacturing. No countdowns, no "before the bell", no artificial scarcity attached to a security.
- No undisclosed affiliate or commercial relationships.
4. Bylines
Editorial content is published under the house byline StocksAce Editorial.
That is a deliberate choice, and worth explaining because the convention in this sector runs the other way. Many small-cap publications attach content to a named "analyst" with a headshot and a biography, and a meaningful number of those people do not exist. We would rather publish under an institutional byline that makes no claim we can't stand behind than invent a person to create a false sense of individual accountability.
What the house byline commits us to:
- The publisher — Stock Ships LLC — is named, verifiable and accepts responsibility for the content.
- Every page carries a visible last-updated date.
- Corrections are made in public, on the page, under the process below.
- Where a contributor has a position in a security discussed substantively, it is disclosed in the content.
5. Corrections
We will get things wrong. Market rules change, thresholds move, and we make ordinary mistakes.
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Report it
Email editor@stocksace.com. A link or citation helps but isn't required. Corrections take priority over every other kind of message we receive.
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We check it against the primary source
Not against what we originally read.
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Material errors are corrected on the page, with a dated note
We don't silently edit a substantive error away. The note says what was wrong and when it was fixed. Typos and formatting are simply fixed.
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The updated date changes
So you can tell the page moved.
6. Accuracy has limits, and we say so
A standards page that claims completeness would be its own kind of dishonesty. Specifically:
- Rules and thresholds are accurate as of each page's last-updated date and change over time.
- Float figures are vendor estimates that different providers disagree about.
- Short interest is reported twice monthly and published on a lag — always historical.
- Example figures, screening thresholds and funnel counts in our guides are illustrative starting points, not standards.
- Calculator outputs are arithmetic on figures you supply, not valuations or forecasts.
7. What we are not
StocksAce is a publisher. Stock Ships LLC is not a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer or financial planner. Nothing we publish is personalised advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation, and reading it or corresponding with us creates no adviser relationship. Our full disclosures set this out in detail.
If something on this site doesn't match what's on this page, that's a failure worth telling us about: editor@stocksace.com. A standards document nobody checks is decoration.