Methodology
Surer Market Signals is the signal layer for small-commercial, cyber and E&S placement — not another news feed. This page explains exactly where each item comes from, what “scored” means, and what we refuse to do to get a story. If you place these lines for a living, you should be able to check our work.
What we watch
Everything we publish is derived from public, linkable sources. There are four classes:
- Trade press. The established industry outlets — appetite announcements, capacity deals, launches, exits, ratings actions, and the people moves that precede appetite changes.
- State rate filings. Public SERFF records. A carrier expanding a product state by state files before it issues a press release — the filing fan-out is often the earliest visible sign that appetite is shifting toward your book.
- Public registries & company announcements. Carrier and MGA disclosures, partnership and capacity notices, appointment announcements.
- People moves. New underwriting or product leadership at a carrier or MGA is a leading indicator: appetite tends to follow the person who sets it.
What “scored” means
We don't print everything we find — most of it isn't actionable. Three things decide whether an item earns a place in the issue:
- Corroboration. An item is stronger when more than one independent source points the same way. A filing plus a capacity announcement plus a hire is a pattern; one blog post is a rumor.
- Recency. Signals decay. An appetite change from eight months ago is context; one from last week is a placement decision. We weight fresh items and let stale ones fade.
- Actionability. The bar every item must clear: it has to change what you quote, place, remarket, or watch this quarter. If an item is merely interesting, it doesn't ship. That's the entire editorial policy.
Behind the digest is a continuously-updated map of who writes what, where, and who runs it. New items are matched against that map, scored, and then — every issue, no exceptions — read by a human before it goes out. The machine does the sweep; a person makes the call.
A worked example
Illustrative — the shape of a signal, not a specific issue.
The filing. A cyber MGA files a new small-commercial program in three states in the same week — states where it previously wrote nothing.
What it implied. A three-state fan-out in one week is an expansion, not a one-off. New capacity was about to land in markets that had been thin — before any announcement. For an agent writing cyber in those states, that is a market opening.
What we did with it. We flagged it as a Filing signal with the states named and one action: get on the producer list now, ahead of the agents who'll hear about it when the press release lands a month later.
What we don't do
The limits are the product as much as the signals are:
- No private data. We analyze public market activity, never anyone's book, submissions, or client information.
- No LinkedIn automation, no scraping of private profiles. People moves come from public announcements and trade press, not from automating anyone's network.
- No paywalled content. If we can't source it to a public, linkable origin, it doesn't run. Every item carries its source.
- Information, not advice. We report what changed in the market and the general action it implies. We don't tell you to move a specific client to a specific carrier — that's your judgment and your license.
Corrections
We get things wrong sometimes; a wrong number in an intelligence product is worse than a missing one. When we do, the fix is made in the archive and noted in the following issue's footer — never quietly. Numbers carry their baseline and period, and a suspicious figure gets cut rather than guessed.