Why "did nothing" is a result

Most alerting tools are silent until they fire. That leaves you with a question you cannot answer: is it quiet because nothing happened, or because it stopped working?

Three states, never merged#

• Told you. The rule was met.
• Nothing to do. We looked, with the data we needed, and the rule was not met. This is a positive statement.
• Could not check. We did not have the data. This is a statement about us, not about the stock.

The last two are easy to confuse and we keep them apart on purpose. If the House has not published a report we can read, an agent watching Congress says it could not check. It does not say no member traded.

Why it matters#

• You can trust the silence. A week of Nothing to do lines means seven checks were made.
• You can see a broken source. A run of Could not check lines points at a data problem, and it points at it on the day it starts.
• You can tune the rule. If an agent says Nothing to do for three months, the threshold may be too far away to be useful. If it reports every day, it is too close.
• Nothing is rewritten afterwards. One line per day, written that day.

What the agent looked at#

Every run lists what it checked: which names and which sources. A Nothing to do line that says it checked 12 names against the movers list for Nov 6 is something you can verify. A blank is not.