Direction agreement is the share of stocks where our forecast and a completely independent third-party model point the same way — both up, or both down. It is a corroboration check: a second opinion from a model that has no idea ours exists.
There is an obvious problem with any company grading its own homework. We built our forecasting model, we chose how to test it, and we publish the results. Even with the best intentions, that is a closed loop.
One way to open the loop is to bring in a model we did not build, did not train, and cannot tune — run it on the same stocks over the same periods, and see whether it reaches the same conclusions. Where it agrees with us, that is a small piece of independent corroboration. Where it disagrees, that is a flag worth taking seriously.
Chronos-2 is a time-series foundation model published by Amazon. A "foundation model" here means the same thing it means for language models: it was pre-trained on an enormous, diverse collection of time-series data, and it can then forecast a series it has never seen before without being retrained on it. That last property is called zero-shot forecasting.
The relevant point for you is what it is NOT. It is not tuned to our data, our tickers, or our preferences. We cannot make it agree with us. That independence is the entire reason it is worth showing — a second opinion is only worth something if the second opinion is genuinely free to disagree.
We are explicit on the calibration page that Chronos-2 is not more accurate than our model — its 90% band coverage is measurably lower at every horizon we test. We do not show it because it beats us. We show it because an independent check is more credible than a self-assessment, and because publishing a comparison we could have quietly omitted is the point.
For each stock in the test basket, both models produce a forecast. We ask a single yes/no question of each: relative to the starting price, does this forecast point up, or down? Direction agreement is simply the share of stocks where both models gave the same answer.
Note what is deliberately thrown away. The size of the move does not matter; the confidence does not matter; whether either model was actually RIGHT does not matter. It is a pure agreement count between two opinions, which is what makes it a corroboration signal rather than a performance metric.
The asymmetry is the useful part. Agreement should not make you bolder, but disagreement can reasonably make you more cautious.
When both models point the same way, you have learned relatively little: the easy cases are exactly where independent models converge, so agreement is cheapest precisely when it is least needed. When they point opposite ways, you have learned something real — this stock sits in genuinely contested territory, where two different methods reading the same history reach opposite conclusions. That is a good moment to want a wider margin, a smaller position, or no position.
We tested whether to formalise this — gating our conviction score on agreement with Chronos-2 — and it produced no measurable improvement in directional accuracy. So we do not do it. The column is published as information for you, not as a hidden input to our signals, and saying so plainly is more useful than quietly adding a feature that did not work.
The core trap is treating agreement as confirmation. Two models trained on the same historical market, both looking at the same price history, are not truly independent observers of the future — they share the past. When they agree, some of that agreement reflects a shared blind spot, not converging evidence. In a genuine change in market conditions, models tend to be wrong together.
The second trap is treating a directional call as the whole forecast. "Up" is not a plan. Two models agreeing on "up" tells you nothing about how far, how likely, over what horizon, or what happens if it goes the other way. The band, the entry level and the invalidation level are where the actionable content lives.
Third, do not confuse this with the directional hit rate, which measures how often a model got the direction RIGHT against what actually happened. Direction agreement never checks reality at all — it only checks whether two models said the same thing. They sound similar and answer completely different questions.
The share of tested stocks where our forecast and an independent third-party model (Amazon Chronos-2) point the same way relative to the starting price — both up, or both down.
A time-series foundation model published by Amazon: pre-trained on a large, diverse collection of time series, and able to forecast a new series without being retrained on it. We do not train or tune it, which is exactly what makes it useful as an independent second opinion.
No — its 90% confidence-band coverage is measurably lower than ours at every horizon we test, and we say so on the calibration page. We publish the comparison because an independent cross-check is more credible than grading our own homework, not because it wins.
No. Agreement is not accuracy — two models can agree and both be wrong, and they agree most readily on the easy cases. Disagreement is the more informative signal, and it is a reason to lean toward caution, never a reason to buy.
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Educational research only — not investment advice.