The Herd Index · week 39

How it works

STEP 1
EXTRACT
Every week an AI pipeline reads the new videos of the channels we follow and pulls out each directional call on a listed company: who said it, which ticker, long or short, and the quote. Repeated calls on the same ticker merge into one bet.
STEP 2
SCORE
Each bet is priced from the first close after the video and measured against the S&P 500 total return over the same period. A herder's score is the decay-weighted average of their bets: fresh calls count fully, old ones fade with a 182-day half-life.
STEP 3
RANK
Herders with at least 8 completed bets are ranked by score. The top 10 on the first Friday of a quarter are The Herd, frozen until the next quarter. The line is their average score.
STEP 4
COMPOSE
The Herd Index is the portfolio of The Herd's open long bets: equal weight per herder, split over that herder's bets, rebalanced every Friday and held against the S&P 500.

The One Rule
Every bet is scored against the S&P 500.
A herder's score is the decay-weighted average of their bets.
The Herd's line is the average score of its ten members.
Beat the line or get relegated.

Frozen #	Herder	League rank now	Open longs
1	All-In Podcast	1	31
2	a16z	2	16
3	Nikhil Kamath	6	4
4	BWB - Business With Brian	3	103
5	Alex Kantrowitz	4	12
6	Top Traders Unplugged	7	0	no open long — not in the index this week
7	Invest Like The Best	8	29
8	Bg2 Pod	12	1
9	Hard Fork	13	2
10	The Compound	11	100

Methodology

What counts as a bet

A bet is one herder, one ticker, one direction (long or short), built from the mentions in that herder's own videos. The first mention sets the publication date, the latest mention the last-mentioned date. Mentions are attributed to the channel they were made on: what a herder says as a guest on someone else's show is not their bet.

Window and extension

A bet stays open for 182 days after its last mention. Every new mention of the same ticker in the same direction moves the window: another 182 days from that date. A bet is completed when 182 days pass without a mention.

Entry

Entry is the first trading-day close strictly after the video was published, never the price quoted in the video. A bet whose ticker has no traded close after publication is not scored.

Excess vs S&P 500 TR

Each bet is measured as its total return from entry minus the S&P 500 total return (^SP500TR) over the same period, both with dividends reinvested. For a short bet the sign is inverted. Open bets are valued at the latest Friday close, completed bets at the end of their window.

Decay weighting

A herder's score (ranking points) is the weighted average of their bets' excess returns. The weight is 0.5 to the power of age/182, where age is the number of days since the bet's last mention: a bet counts half after 182 days and a quarter after 364. Ranking points are percentage points of average excess, not a portfolio return.

Qualifying

A herder needs 8 completed bets to qualify for The Herd. Until then they are ranked and shown as approaching.

The quarterly freeze

On the first Friday of each quarter the 10 highest-ranked qualified herders become The Herd, frozen for the quarter. The ranking keeps moving every week; the membership does not. The Herd's line is the equal-weight average of the members' ranking points. Beat the line or get relegated: the lowest members sit in the relegation zone, the best qualified outsiders in the promotion zone.

Index constituents

Top 5 holds the 5 highest-ranked herders in the current freeze, The Herd all 10, and All herders every active herder with no selection at all.

Index weights

Every constituent with at least one open long bet gets an equal share of the index. That share is split equally over the herder's open long bets and summed per ticker, so a stock that two herders both hold weighs twice as much. A herder with no open long bet is left out that week and their share goes to the others: the index is always fully invested.

Rebalancing

Weekly, Friday close to Friday close. A bet enters at the first Friday on or after its entry date, so a bet published on a Friday is in from the next Friday. It leaves at the first Friday after its window ends. Constituents change on the freeze Friday, and a departing herder's bets leave that same day.

Benchmark and levels

The index and the S&P 500 both start at 100 on 2025-01-03 and compound their weekly total returns. The benchmark is ^SP500TR, with SPY as fallback when it is unavailable.

Missing prices

A ticker with no close in the holding week is left out of that week's portfolio and the remaining weights are renormalised, so a delisted stock never earns a silent zero. Every exclusion is logged.

What is simulated

Real freezes exist from 2026-09-04. Before that, the history replays the freeze rule on each quarter's first Friday with the data known at the time; those weeks are shaded as simulated on the curve. No week sees a mention dated after that Friday.

Season 1

Season 1 opened on 2026-09-04, the first real freeze. The scoreboard at the top of this page counts from that Friday; the curve can show the whole replay since 2025-01-03.

What is excluded

Short bets are not held by the index, although they still count in the herders' scores. Mentions without a listed ticker, and mentions made outside a herder's own channel, are not bets.

AI-generated AI-generated content. The bets, quotes and theses behind these boards are extracted from video transcripts by an AI pipeline, and the scores, rankings and this index are computed from them automatically. Extraction errors happen: a misread ticker, a joke taken as a call, a mention that was missed. Prices are from Yahoo Finance.

Entertainment, not investment advice — the host is a sheep. The Herd Index is not an investable product. No per-ticker weights are published, nothing can be bought or tracked, and nothing on this page is a recommendation to buy or sell any security.

THE HERD INDEX · WEEK 39

The curve — base 100 vs the S&P 500 total return