A New Layer of Insight: WU Advanced Brought to Life

After months of building, tuning, and testing, I’m happy to introduce WU Advanced: our answer to delivering more sophisticated signals to market junkies—and our first real step toward applying our methodology to individual stocks. The broad market is one thing, but individual stocks are part of almost every portfolio, including mine.

WU Advanced isn’t here to replace deep fundamental research—it’s built to enhance it. We still believe the first rule of investing in a company is knowing what it does, how it competes, and how financially sound it is. But once that groundwork is laid, the next challenge becomes timing: when to step in, how long to hold, and when to step away. That’s where WU Advanced comes in. It’s designed to help you navigate those decisions with a more technical, data-driven perspective—offering advanced stock-level tools and market-wide signals, including our newly renamed “Buy the Dip” indicators that guided us through the recent corrections.

This release brings together several tools we’ve been testing behind the scenes—tools designed to make your stock research and strategy-building more structured, repeatable, and useful. It’s not trying to be everything—it’s built to support the parts of your process where data can sharpen your edge. But before diving into the features, let me explain why we created it as a standalone offering.

Why WU Advanced 

Our WU S&P 500 service is entirely focused on using data to better understand what the market is doing—when risk is high or low, when a correction is underway or nearing its end, and so on. Initially built around the hedge strategy we developed for ourselves, it has grown steadily with the addition of new indicators (like the Option Model and Risk Index) and new features. The most recent addition, DataHub, launched just before Christmas, allows us to track our signals outside of TradingView—often with better refresh rates, since some of our TradingView signals only update after the close.

So why create a separate offering rather than simply continuing to expand the WU S&P 500 package?

One reason is the diversity within the WU community. Some of you thrive on digging deep into the data—always looking for the next layer—while others already feel we’re nearing signal overload. And that’s understandable: over the years, we’ve continuously added new signals to our core S&P 500 offering, which has made it more powerful, but also more complex. For some, more complexity adds value; for others, it gets in the way. That tension is exactly why WU Advanced was created: to give power users access to the more advanced signals they’ve been asking for, without overwhelming those who prefer to keep things simple.

Also, while this new product began as an extension of market data for the true data junkies, it quickly evolved into something broader—a deeper focus on individual stocks. That shift wasn’t planned; it came naturally as we kept asking what would actually help us as investors. And the answer kept pointing toward tools that go beyond the index level and support decision-making at the stock level. As you’ll see, that evolution made it harder to justify bundling WU Advanced with our core S&P 500 offer. It’s not that anything was removed from the market-level data—in fact, we’ve expanded it—but we’ve also added several features designed to support different stages of the stock investing process.

Another factor is the simple reality that institutional-grade data is expensive. I’ve mentioned Squeeze Metrics before—their API offers four signals, including GEX (which is similar to our Option Model) and DIX (which parallels our Dark Pool indicator), and it costs $720 per month. While that might seem steep compared to a WU subscription, it’s actually modest by institutional standards. Most of the data feeds we rely on fall within that range—or higher—and many come with strict usage limits, such as a cap of 50 API calls per day.

I often read that Bloomberg Terminals are reserved for the wealthy (at around $25,000 per year), but frankly, that’s reasonable compared to some of the quotes we’ve seen. The worst one? A Nasdaq Data Link package: $150,000 per year flat fee, plus $3,000 per month per computer. And for many feeds, the bill grows as our user base does, since more users means more API calls. (Not everything can be preloaded or computed in advance when working with thousands of stocks.)

In short, there’s a massive price tag attached to bringing this kind of data to retail investors. WU Advanced is one way for us to share part of that cost.

I had a friend who worked as an accountant for a well-known theatre. He used to say that being an accountant in an artistic environment was a constant cultural clash:

Artist: “The play will be incredible!”

Accountant friend : “Yes, but we’re going to lose money.”

Artist: “But the play will be incredibleeee!”

That’s pretty much how it feels at WU these days—especially with Nathalie, who handles our finances:

Nathalie: “What are these new steep data fees on the credit card?”

Vincent or Zack: “Well... they look expensive, but the data is amazing…”

Nathalie:

No, I’m joking with this comic strip—Nathalie is actually a chill and kind person. But… the rest of the story is kind of true.

We don’t expect to break even on this new subscription tier for a while. That said, we’ll still benefit from it through our investment fund. In fact, the trades I’ve already made—APP, WIX and CFLT, using our Retail Momentum Screener (which I’ll introduce later in this post)—have likely already covered part of the cost for these first years.

In a Google survey we conducted last year, we asked for your thoughts on WU Advanced after outlining the vision behind it—specifically, whether you’d be willing to pay for it, and what pricing you’d consider reasonable. The response was clear: $30/month came out as the strong consensus (and it’s even less for yearly subscribers on a monthly basis).

Some of you may have changed subscription tiers in the past—switching from monthly to yearly, for example—and found the process a bit clunky, or had to contact Nathalie to handle it. We were aware of the issue. The root of the problem was that although payments were processed through Stripe, subscriptions were actually managed through WIX, which doesn’t offer robust subscription tools. That brings us to one of the reasons WU Advanced launched slightly later than planned: we had to migrate everything to a fully Stripe-based subscription system. That migration was seamless on your end, but behind the scenes… it was a bit of a nightmare. The good news is that it was worth it.

Thanks to this overhaul, upgrading to WU Advanced is now incredibly simple. The system will automatically recognize your current subscription, how much time is left, and calculate any upgrade fees accordingly. If you do run into any issues, feel free to reach out to info@thewealthumbrella.com, but the process should be smooth and effortless.

What is WU Advanced

When you subscribe to WU Advanced, it will unlock four new dashboards on our platform, along with a few other features. The first dashboard, called Advanced Signal DataHub, is where you'll find the Buy the Dips indicator we recently used, along with several other advanced market signals that I’ll explain later in this post.

The three other dashboards are focused on individual stocks. Each one supports a different phase of the process of investing in a stock:

This is what the navigation will look like inside our new DataHub.

Retail Momentum Screener

The first dashboard is our Retail Momentum Screener, which we’ve mentioned a few times before. It leverages isolated retail investor data to identify stocks that might be on the verge of a strong momentum run.

The idea behind this project stems from the fact that, although retail money accounts for only a small fraction of total market capital, it often concentrates on a few select stocks—stocks where a kind of “love story” emerges. This pattern resembles the lifecycle of successful consumer products: early adopters lead the charge, followed by first followers, and eventually the attention snowballs into widespread popularity. Tesla's rise from 2020 onward is one example. But it was the GameStop (GME) saga that unfolded in such a unique and dramatic fashion that it made our screener possible.

After institutions took major losses on their GME short positions in the face of a retail-driven buying frenzy, institutional data providers began to see value in separating retail activity from the broader market. That made this kind of analysis technically feasible.

What truly pushed us to build the screener in early 2023 was a question we kept asking ourselves: How could we have detected the epic runs of Upstart (UPST) and Affirm (AFRM) that began in late summer 2021 and culminated in November?

By chance, I was already holding both stocks at the time. I was close to giving up on UPST after months of sideways action around $135, until they released their earnings in august 2021 and the rally began. But let’s say I hadn’t been there—how could I have known that jumping in on that earnings day would lead to a sustained breakout? One strong enough to go viral for about 2-3 months—so viral that some guy went on TV hyping the stock without even knowing what the company did?!

This is the angle we took when we decided to focus on retail data—we tackled that dataset like a mountain, approaching it from every side using signal processing, statistics, and even machine learning.

2022 and early 2023 didn’t give us many momentum runs outside of big cap, as even strong earnings reports often weren’t enough to lift a stock in the face of a broad market downtrend. That said, we were fortunate to see the screener prove itself during the AI-driven rally in 2024. While we were still tuning it, it flagged several strong opportunities, including Applovin (APP), Palantir (PLTR), and Vistra (VST).

As we explored retail investor data, a clear pattern emerged: momentum within the retail segment isn’t anecdotal—it’s consistent and measurable. Over a one-year period, our Retail Momentum Screener shows an average gain of 52% and a median of 27.5%, with more than 94% of flagged runs posting a positive return. That’s a stark contrast to broader market stats.

For those interested in using the Retail Momentum Screener, we’ve written a more detailed post explaining how it works, what types of companies tend to get flagged, and the historical odds of a successful run once a signal is triggered. But in short, the core idea behind this piece of code is to help us discover new stocks where a retail love story is building—momentum that could ultimately lead to a significant price appreciation.

Stock Health Dashboard

Once we discover a new stock—whether through our Retail Momentum Screener, an analyst recommendation, or any other source—the next logical step is to assess its quality. That’s where our Stock Health Dashboard comes in. It brings together a set of signals designed to quickly evaluate whether a company’s financial and operational profile aligns with our investment criteria. The dashboard includes a range of metrics to help you gauge the overall strength of a stock at a glance.

As you can see in the snapshot, the information is organized into six distinct buckets. The first five focus directly on evaluating the quality of a stock: Technicals, Valuation, Financials, Earnings Momentum, and Analysts. Each is presented in a visual format, highlighting the key data points we believe are most relevant when assessing a company.

While many of these data points can also be found on TradingView, testing our interface revealed—much to our surprise—that several financial figures on TradingView were inaccurate. Whenever we encountered discrepancies between TradingView and our institutional-grade data source, our figures consistently matched the company’s official earnings reports. If you prefer not to subscribe to WU Advanced, it’s worth noting that, among the free data sources we compared our results to, Yahoo Finance consistently showed the most accurate financial data.

As mentioned above, the five buckets each look at a stock from a specific angle, using metrics that directly contribute to assessing whether a stock is investable or not. Our long-term goal is to develop an automated assessment that provides a single rating based on a weighted combination of these indicators.

We’ve seen similar features on other platforms, but we’ve never found one that actually delivers meaningful results. And we understand why. Take RSI, for example: while it’s objectively true that a stock with an RSI of 75 has stronger momentum than one at 30, it’s far less obvious whether that makes it a better buy. Indeed, for several good stocks, buying at a low RSI offers better chances of profit than buying at a high one. But in other cases, stocks sitting at RSI 30 never recover—and some at 75 stay elevated for months, continuing to appreciate in price. In other words, the relationship between certain metrics and a stock’s investability is complex and nonlinear—which helps explain why automated stock assessments often fall short. Instead of offering an oversimplified and potentially misleading rating, we chose to give you a rich set of signals that support your own judgment—while we continue to rigorously backtest ways to combine them into a statistically robust overall assessment (if we ever succeed).

The first five buckets are designed to support the investability assessment of a stock. The sixth bucket—Alt Data—serves a different purpose but remains just as important. Not everything we need to know about a stock is directly tied to whether we should hold it or not. Some data points are simply useful context.

In this group, you’ll find basic metrics like Beta, which gives a sense of the volatility you should expect. You’ll also see indicators like the Average True Range (ATR), a figure often used by institutional investors to set trailing stop-losses at twice the current ATR value.For example, if you entered Applovin (APP) on the Retail Momentum Screener signal from November 7th, 2024, when the stock was around $240, a trailing stop-loss set at 2×ATR (2×7.5%) would have held through the rally and exited around December 10th, near $350—capturing a significant portion of the move.

Even when not used for stop-loss purposes, the 2×ATR still provides a reliable estimate of what constitutes normal price oscillation versus abnormal volatility. It’s also commonly used to guide position sizing in stock allocation.

Alongside these numbers, you’ll find two charts in the Alt Data section. The first displays Dark Pool activity specific to the stock you are looking at. Since Dark Pool data can be extremely noisy, we applied the same statistical treatment we use on QQQ for our hedge model—expressing the signal in terms of standard deviation to better highlight meaningful activity.

The second chart shows what we call the Market-Neutral Price Trend. It’s a signal we developed to reveal how a stock is really behaving—without the influence of the overall market. We remove the market effect using the stock’s beta, so if the stock is just following the market, the line will look flat. But if the stock has its own trend, this signal will make it stand out. For example, running it on SPY (which represents the market) gives you a flat line. But run it on Nvidia, and you’ll see it clearly caught the wind in its sails as soon as ChatGPT went viral in November 2022.

Or take Tesla: after showing remarkable resilience during most of the 2022 bear market, its market-neutral trend collapsed in October as enthusiasm around EV stocks began to fade.

We created this signal to address what we believe is the real danger of investing in individual stocks: getting caught in a downtrend that the stock never recovers from. Sometimes, a stock drops simply because the overall market is down—that’s usually not a long-term problem, even if it’s temporarily painful, because markets tend to recover. But other times, a stock faces its own specific headwinds, and that decline can last for years—or become permanent. This distinction matters, and that’s exactly what this indicator is designed to show you.

To learn more about this novel signal, as well as all other metrics on the dashboard, we encourage you to read our dedicated post on the Stock Health Dashboard, which serves as a user manual for this new tab of our DataHub .

TuneMap

As explained in the previous section, one key difference with individual stocks is that they can develop their own trend—one that sometimes leads to a major loss in value and, in some cases, never fully recovers. That’s why I see more risk in holding individual stocks than I do in holding something like SPY or QQQ. You’ve probably seen me stay patient with my market positions even during drawdowns—and that’s because I know that, over time, even if I miss the exit, the market will eventually make new highs. But I don’t have that same patience when it comes to individual stocks. And that’s why, when you hold a stock, you need a plan. A trailing stop-loss is one way to manage risk, but technical signals can also play a crucial role.

At WealthUmbrella, our BroadMarket hedge strategy doesn’t rely heavily on technical indicators—not because we think they’re useless (although we definitely don’t love them all equally), but because we have access to a far richer dataset when it comes to the overall market. With S&P 500-related instruments, we can tap into things like options flow, component behavior, buyer/seller dynamics, and more. That depth allows us to build signals on a stronger foundation than most traditional technical tools. But when you’re dealing with individual stocks, that depth simply isn’t available. In that context, technical indicators become one of the best tools we have for managing risk, and for refining entry and exit strategies in a systematic way.

That’s exactly why we built TuneMap. When it comes to individual stocks, we wanted a better way to test technical strategies—one that actually adapts to the behavior of each stock. Most platforms give you fixed settings, but the reality is that what works for Nvidia won’t necessarily work for Costco or PayPal. TuneMap is our stock-specific strategy optimizer. It automatically scans thousands of parameter combinations across various technical indicators and helps you find the configuration that fits both the stock and your investing style—whether you want higher returns, fewer trades, or tighter drawdown control. Originally built for internal use in 2021, it quickly became a core part of how we design our signals at WealthUmbrella. With WU Advanced, we’re now making it available to you too.

At its core, TuneMap solves a simple but important problem. If you’ve ever tried to build a strategy in TradingView, you know the drill: you write the code, set your indicator parameters, and run the backtest. But if you want to try different settings, you have to change them manually and re-run the whole thing—again and again. TuneMap automates that process. It precomputes all possible combinations of parameters across several indicators and presents the results visually, so you can instantly see what works best for a given stock. No coding, no guesswork—just a clear map of which setups have historically performed well. Here, for example, is the map we get for ROKU using a simple fast/slow EMA crossover strategy.

You can instantly see that the best-performing combination is a 28-day fast EMA with a 34-day slow EMA, which lead to a very efficient strategy that would have yield these stats.

Since an optimal strategy isn’t just about maximizing returns—but also about how well it fits your personal investing style, like trade frequency, hit rate, or maximum drawdown—we provide all of these maps so you can make the choice that best aligns with your preferences.

and then let you visualize your own strategy for yourself.

This is something we genuinely fell in love with while building. TuneMap wasn’t even part of our original plan for WU Advanced until very late in the project. Initially, it was just an internal tool we built for testing our indicators on SPY and QQQ—like when we were developing our Option Model and needed a way to fine-tune its parameters. I don’t even remember exactly how it ended up on the roadmap, but once it did, it devoured all of Zack’s and my time—time we poured into it with real joy.

That said, building it came with serious challenges, especially on the computational side. In the beginning, generating all the maps for a single stock took over an hour, which made it feel completely unrealistic for a product that aimed to cover hundreds or thousands of stocks. But after a lot of optimization, trade-offs, and a serious upgrade to a kick-ass server, we got the processing time down to 1–2 minutes per stock—something we finally felt comfortable scaling.

What you’re seeing now is our minimum viable product—a strong foundation we plan to build on with new features like more technical indicators, the ability to save your preferred strategies, and advanced stress testing tools. We’re actively counting on your feedback to shape what comes next. And while this first version only scratches the surface of our full vision for TuneMap, we already believe it’s a powerful and scientifically solid tool. In fact, I could write an entire post just about the pitfalls we had to avoid and all the details we had to get right to ensure the results were truly valid. That process of checking, rechecking, and challenging our assumptions took more time than the actual coding—and it’s what makes us confident in what we’re launching today.

To explore TuneMap’s features in more depth and learn how it works, here’s the user manual we’ve written for it.

Advanced Datahub

While much of this post has focused on the tools we’ve developed for individual stock investing, the Advanced Market Signal Datahub represents the other half of the equation — our effort to help members navigate the market from a macro and tactical perspective. It’s a core component of the WU Advanced offering, built for investors who want more than just hedge signals. While our S&P 500 package centers around efficient downside protection, this Datahub goes further: it delivers deeper insight into market structure, sector rotation, correction dynamics, and volatility regimes. It’s designed to help you position not only what you invest in, but when and how you do it — based on the rhythm of the broader market.

It’s structured into three main sections:

1. Sector Strength Indicators

   These tools help you understand where institutional flows are going by tracking leadership shifts across sectors. It includes:

   
   

   • A heatmap of sector outperformance vs the S&P 500

   • A quadrant chart showing momentum and strength shifts

   • A matchup tool comparing sectors head-to-head on a beta-adjusted basis (e.g., ARKK vs QQQ or Energy vs Tech)

   

   
   

2. Downtrend Exhaustion Dashboard

   Formerly known as our “Buy the Dip” toolkit, this section features three advanced signals designed to detect when selling pressure is likely exhausted—making them particularly useful for lifting hedges, re-entering, or reducing cash positions. These Downtrend Exhaustion signals are, by far, the most complex we’ve ever built—requiring as much effort (if not more) than the entire development of our Hedge strategy, despite our deeper experience with market data today. Their new name feels especially fitting—not just because it reflects what they’re meant to identify, but also because building them left me genuinely exhausted. After months (year) of iteration, I feel I’ve truly exhausted this line of research, having tested just about every possible angle the data could offer.

   
   

   Each signal captures a different dimension of market behavior.

   
   

   • Market Pattern Exhaustion uses price structure, volume, and volatility to spot potential bottoms. It’s the one that triggered a giant red spike—live—right at the April low during the recent correction.

   • Protection Premium Distortion flags moments when protective options are overpriced, signaling peak fear

   • Option Pricing Conflict Index detects unusual divergences in short- vs long-term option expectations

   
   

   These signals are tiered by conviction and built with strong false-positive resistance to ensure confidence during emotionally difficult decisions.

   

   
   

3. Other Signals

   This section includes dynamic, high-value tools such as:

   
   

   • A Volatility Trend indicator that tracks regime changes (low, high, or transition)

   • Our enhanced Sahm Rule (WU Edition) recession trigger, which improves on the original by avoiding recent false positives

   • Visualizations that place the current hedge trade in historical context—helping members understand where our Hedge Strategy stands now, and decide if or when it makes sense to actively adjust their exposure.

   

   
   

Throughout, the emphasis is on clarity, precision, and usefulness — turning complex institutional-grade data into clean, intuitive visuals that help members stay positioned with conviction. The Datahub is not static: it’s built to evolve as new signals are developed and tested. Here is a dedicated post covering this part of the WU Advanced offering.

Others

TradingView Sandbox: In addition to the four main dashboards, WU Advanced users will also get access to our TradingView Sandbox. This is where we share some of our experimental signals—indicators we find interesting but that are still undergoing testing or haven’t yet been fully integrated into our main S&P 500 signal suite.

That said, not all Sandbox signals are incomplete. In many cases, they’ve already been thoroughly backtested, but we’re still unsure whether they play a distinct enough role to include in the core offer. Some may also be in the process of being promoted to our official WU Advanced Market Signal Dashboard.

This space will be especially valuable for our more DIY-inclined members—of which I know there are many in our community.

WU Advanced Forum: This brings me to the final feature we’re rolling out for WU Advanced subscribers: a dedicated forum focused on advanced data and individual stock exploration.

Internally, a forum has been discussed since the early days of WealthUmbrella. I’ve personally resisted it until now—mainly because, from what I’ve heard, forums can easily turn into time-consuming monsters. Investing is an emotional game: it can bring euphoric highs and brutal (but temporary!) lows. These swings often show up in comment sections, and I’ve worried I’d end up spending too much time moderating emotions instead of doing what I do best—crunching numbers.

Also, when I share market updates, I know I don’t cover everything—but I believe the comment sections already offer a good place for filling in the gaps I miss. Plus, I get a lot of emails asking for financial advice—questions that I legally can’t answer, and that I know would inevitably spill into a forum environment.

That said, my perspective is different when it comes to WU Advanced. This offering is designed for our more seasoned members, and it has a different nature—one that’s more exploratory, diversified, and less centered around me as the “main voice.” In that context, I think having a space where we can share discoveries, results, experiments, and insights can be incredibly enriching for all of us. In my usual role here, I’m the Panda University professor delivering the lecture—but the truth is, I know many of you have things we could learn from. And I don’t say that lightly—there have been multiple occasions where I’ve learned directly from members of this community.

Personally, I’m already feeling the urge to share some of the great strategy configurations I’ve uncovered with TuneMap—and I know some of you will want to do the same. Whether you’ve used our signals in creative ways, discovered new setups, or even built your own indicators, this will be the place to exchange that kind of knowledge. I imagine that’s the kind of post I’ll make on the forum—but I hope to see it animated by you, not just by me. And I’m genuinely looking forward to it.

The forum isn’t ready just yet. But we didn’t want to delay the launch of WU Advanced for that reason—especially since I imagine the first few weeks will be about you exploring the new features and asking questions on related blog posts.

That said, we expect the forum to be up and running by the end of June/beginning of July.

Conclusion

We’re excited to finally launch WU Advanced. We know it won’t be for everyone—and that’s by design. This new product was created specifically for those in our community who want more tools to explore other aspects of the investing journey.

We started working on WealthUmbrella back in 2021, and nearly four years later, this release completes the vision we originally had. That doesn’t mean we’re closing our laptops and calling it a day—far from it. But from now on, our focus will shift from building entirely new products to making everything we’ve already built even better.

I’ve already shared some of our plans for improving TuneMap, but we have similar roadmaps for every part of the platform—from giving Bitcoin the attention it deserves, to improving our S&P 500 tutorials, to evolving every feature in WU Advanced that we just introduced. We also hope you’ll contribute to this evolution—by sharing your feedback in the comments, posting in the upcoming forum, or writing to us directly at dev@thewealthumbrella.com. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the new tools—and that they help you navigate your investing journey with more clarity and confidence.

-– Vincent (on honeymoon, sending ravens from King’s Landing)