Building Custom Signals
One of 41 lessons in the Certified Predictionist. This is exactly how a lesson reads inside the course.
Library signals are the consensus instruments. Your edge comes from signals nobody else is watching — and that is what the Signal Builder is for. The credential requires you to connect two custom signals to at least one of your three plans, so do this deliberately, not as an afterthought.
You can build five kinds. A Google Search Trend reads public curiosity about any term — beliefs shift faster than earnings. Wikipedia Attention tracks daily pageviews for a topic. A HackerNews Pulse measures how often a subject surfaces among builders. GitHub Velocity reads commit activity on a repo — useful when a technology's adoption is your real driver. And a Composite blends two or more signals into one normalized index, which is how you turn a thesis into a single readable line.
The workflow is the same every time: pick a type, fill the form, hit Preview to see the series, then Save to library. A good custom signal is a leading indicator of your strategic question that the consensus is not pricing. Before you build, write the question down — then build the two signals that would move first if your thesis were starting to come true. Those two go into your plan in the next lesson.
