I shipped institutional-grade data for free and the hardest part was not the data

SIGNUM HQ shows dark pool share, max pain, gamma exposure, the dealer gamma flip and unusual sweeps — per US ticker, free, no account. Most of that lives behind terminals that cost more per month than rent.

Getting the data was the part I expected to be hard. It was not. Here is what actually was:

Explaining a number without telling anyone what to do with it. Every useful market metric is one sentence away from sounding like advice. "Gamma flips negative below 185" is a fact. Add one helpful word and it becomes a recommendation, which in Korea puts you under a licensing regime and in the App Store puts you in a review queue. I ended up writing the constraint into the generation prompt itself rather than trying to catch it afterwards, in all three languages.

Deciding what NOT to show. The temptation with this kind of data is to surface everything, because it all looks impressive. But a screen with forty numbers teaches nothing. I cut it to the handful that change how you read a move, and put the rest one tap deeper.

Being honest about what a metric cannot tell you. Every concept page in the app has a section on exactly that. It is the least fun thing to write and I think it is the reason people stay.

The question I keep going back and forth on, and would like other makers' opinion on:

When your product's whole value is that it shows people something they could not see before, how much interpretation do you owe them? Show the raw number and most people bounce. Interpret it and you have quietly become an advisor. I have landed on "describe the mechanism, never the implication" — but I am not sure that is right, and I would rather hear it now than after launch.

Free, no account, English/Korean/Japanese, iOS and Android. Launching here on August 26.

(Information and education only — not investment advice.)