Everything starts from primary sources wherever they exist: canal and port authority notices, customs and trade statistics, regulatory texts and official releases, and the filings and announcements of the companies involved. Trade press and carrier commentary are used to find stories, not to settle them.
Every entry in the register carries the date it was last reviewed, and every company or sector named against a disruption carries four things: the mechanism by which the problem reaches it, how confident that assessment is, the date of the assessment, and at least one source you can follow. An assessment that cannot supply all four is not published — it is dropped by the site itself, not left to editorial discretion.
The work is reading rather than modelling. Novus Data does not run a proprietary dataset and does not publish forecasts dressed as numbers. Where something is uncertain, it is marked as inferred or estimated rather than stated flatly.
The standard is deliberately awkward to meet. It is easy to write that a company is "exposed" to a problem; it is much harder to say by what mechanism, how well established that is, and when it was last checked. Requiring all of it means the chart fills slowly — and that anything on it is worth the space it takes.
Novus Data publishes analysis and commentary. It is not investment advice, it is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, and it is not a substitute for your own work.
Novus Data is published on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
What it takes to appear on the exposure chart
Naming a company against a problem is a claim someone may act on, so every one of them has to carry four things. An assessment missing any of them is not published — the site drops it when the page is built, rather than leaving it to editorial discretion.
- A mechanism. The sentence explaining how the disruption reaches that company. “Affected” is not a finding.
- A confidence level. How well established the assessment is, stated on the chart itself.
- A date. When the assessment was last true, shown on every cell and every entry.
- A source. At least one, with a publisher and a link you can follow.
What the confidence levels mean
- Reported
- Stated by the company, a regulator, or a named report.
- Inferred
- Follows from disclosed facts such as filings or published routings.
- Estimated
- A judgement from partial information. Treat as the weakest claim here.
Severity is a three-step scale — low, moderate, high — and no finer. A more granular scale would imply a precision that reading public sources cannot support. It measures how hard the problem lands if the mechanism holds; how sure the assessment is belongs to the confidence level, so the two are never mixed.
- Low
- A cost or delay the business can absorb.
- Moderate
- Shows up in its prices, margins or schedules.
- High
- Interrupts core operations or a large share of supply.
How old is too old
Every register entry carries the date it was last reviewed. An entry not reviewed within 21 days says so on its own page rather than presenting itself as current. The review date is the figure to trust: it is a fact about when the work was done, and it does not go out of date the way a relative “three days ago” would.