Key Concepts

Everything in the ByteTree API builds on a handful of ideas. This page explains each one in plain terms. Every section ends with a link to the detailed reference, for when you want to go deeper.

Assets and symbols

An asset is anything ByteTree tracks: a stock, an ETF, a cryptocurrency, a commodity or a market index. Each asset has a symbol — AAPL for Apple, BTCUSD for Bitcoin — and you use that symbol whenever you ask about it. Currency pairs such as EURUSD (euros priced in US dollars) are tracked too.

Go deeper: List Assets · Get Asset

Prices

ByteTree records a price for every asset once a day: the open, high, low and close, plus how much traded (volume). Stocks have a price for each trading day; crypto trades every day of the week, so it has one for every calendar day.

Prices are adjusted for stock splits and dividends by default. That keeps a price chart smooth — it doesn’t suddenly halve when a company splits its shares. If you need the price exactly as it was printed on the day, you can ask for the raw price instead.

Go deeper: Price History · Data Model

The ByteTrend score

ByteTrend is ByteTree’s measure of how strong an asset’s trend is. It is a whole number from 0 to 5, built by asking five yes-or-no questions about the asset’s recent price and counting the yeses:

Is the price above its long-term average?
Is the price above its short-term average?
Is the long-term average rising?
Is the short-term average rising?
Was the most recent extreme a high rather than a low?

Score	What it means
5	Every sign points up — a strong uptrend
1–4	Mixed signals — the higher the number, the healthier the trend
0	Every sign points down — a strong downtrend

Weekly and Daily

Every score comes in two timescales:

Weekly looks at the long-term trend, using 200-week and 30-week averages. It moves slowly and suits questions measured in years.
Daily looks at the shorter-term trend, using 200-day and 30-day averages (trading days — crypto, which trades every day, uses the same span in calendar days). It reacts faster and suits questions measured in months.

Both are recalculated every day — “Weekly” and “Daily” describe how far back each one looks, not how often it updates.

Local and CAPR

Every score is also worked out two ways:

Local scores the asset’s own price, in its own currency. A high Local score means the price is trending up.
CAPR (Currency-Adjusted Price Relative) scores the asset against the world stock market — its US-dollar price divided by the MSCI World index. A high CAPR score means the asset is beating the market, not just rising with it.

Comparing the two tells you something useful: an asset with a Local score of 5 and a CAPR score of 2 on the same timescale is rising, but more slowly than the market as a whole.

Four scores per asset

Two timescales times two ways of measuring gives four scores for every asset, every day:

	Local (own price)	CAPR (against the market)
Weekly	`byteTrendLocal200w`	`byteTrendCapr200w`
Daily	`byteTrendLocal30d`	`byteTrendCapr30d`

Where the API shows a single headline score — on List Assets, for example — it is Weekly CAPR, byteTrendCapr200w.

Go deeper: Latest Metrics — ByteTrend scores · the full scoring rules

Trend regimes

A trend regime is a short label for where an asset’s trend stands. It combines the ByteTrend score with one extra question: is the price (or, for CAPR, the asset’s performance against the market) at its highest or lowest point recently? “Recently” follows the score’s timescale — the last 30 weeks for a Weekly score, the last 30 trading days (about six weeks) for a Daily one.

Regime	When it applies
Leading Trend	Score of 5, at a recent high
Emerging Trend	Score of 1–4, at a recent high
Weakening Trend	Score of 1 or more, at a recent low
Bear Trend	Score of 0, at a recent low
Neutral	Anything else — most assets, most days

Because the named regimes need both conditions at once, an asset can score 5 and still be Neutral if its price has slipped just below its recent high.

For Weekly CAPR, a new label has to hold for five days in a row before it counts as confirmed. That filters out one-day flickers, so the confirmed label is the one to use when you look back over history.

Go deeper: Latest Metrics — Trend Regime · Regime Transitions

Universes

A universe is a named list of assets. bytetrend, for example, contains every stock, ETF, cryptocurrency and commodity ByteTree tracks, and bytefolio contains the holdings of a ByteTree portfolio. Add a universe to an asset search to list just its members:

/api/assets?universe=bytetrend

Go deeper: Universes — the full list, and how each one’s membership is decided

Dimensions and groups

Every asset is classified five ways: by region, country, sector, industry and asset type. These five are the dimensions. Each value within a dimension — Europe, Technology, Banking & Lending — is a group.

ByteTree publishes daily figures for every group: average trend scores, how many assets are in each regime, returns and risk. That lets you compare, say, the average trend of European stocks with North American ones.

Across everything ByteTree tracks — the Macro Dataset.
Within one universe — Universe Groups.

Go deeper: Dimensions

Reading field names

Field names are compact but regular. byteTrendCapr200w reads as ByteTrend score · CAPR · Weekly, and returnUsd12M as return in US dollars over 12 months. A trailing number and letter give the time window:

Suffix	Means	Example
`d`	days	`30d` — the Daily score’s window
`w`	weeks	`200w` — the Weekly score’s window
`M`	months	`returnUsd1M` — one-month return

closeRawUsd, caprRaw and marketCapRawUsd hold the unadjusted, as-printed versions of the price, CAPR and market value — see Data Model.

How often data updates

Once a day. Stocks and indices update on trading days; crypto updates every day; exchange rates update on weekdays. Scores and metrics are recalculated after each day’s prices arrive.

Next: Getting Started walks you through your first request.