1. Where investing YouTubers get their numbers

Sources and service documentation checked on September 6, 2026. Numerical worked examples are hypothetical, not reported investment results.

Investing videos have a familiar visual vocabulary: a long line chart for inflation, a colored table for earnings, and a wall of red and green rectangles after the market closes. Where do those numbers come from? Does reproducing the analysis require an expensive terminal?

Several jobs sit behind that single screen. A company or institution publishes figures. A data provider organizes them. A presenter selects a few and explains what they might mean. The right place to look depends on which part of that process you want to check.

Start with sources a presenter actually disclosed

Episode 140 of Rational Reminder, co-hosted by Ben Felix, offers a useful example. PWL Capital’s transcript discusses Fama and French’s paper Migration. Felix also describes looking at data on Ken French’s website¹, while noting that reproducing the paper’s specially constructed portfolios would take more work. This lets a reader distinguish published research findings from a calculation reproduced with a public dataset.²

Aswath Damodaran’s NYU website provides a different route. His online valuation course links YouTube lessons to slides. His data pages lead to industry figures, archives, and spreadsheets. Instead of copying a chart from a lecture, a reader can inspect the assumptions used in a calculation.³⁴

PensionCraft’s membership documentation lists tools for tracking inflation, employment, credit spreads, and valuations. That establishes that it offers its own tools. It does not establish the upstream data provider for every video. A tool’s name and an individual chart’s original source need separate checks.⁵

For a Korean-language example, the Bank of Korea’s fourth episode of Kim Ki-yeol’s Money Study points viewers toward ECOS⁶ while discussing economic indicators. This is institutional education rather than an independent investing channel, but the route from video to official data is explicit. This series does not infer private subscriptions used by Korean creators without public evidence.⁷

The chart maker and the data producer

Koyfin says it licenses data from multiple vendors. A Koyfin attribution on a chart therefore does not mean Koyfin originally collected every figure.⁸

Think of a restaurant’s name and the origin of its ingredients. To reproduce the presentation, find the charting service. To understand why a number changed, follow it back to the publishing institution and the calculation method.

This is a research map for the rest of the series, not a claim about any channel’s subscriptions.

A description link can serve several purposes

A link beneath a video might identify the chart’s source, introduce a tool, or refer viewers through an affiliate program. Its presence alone does not establish where every number in the video came from.

Make four columns: video and timestamp, metric shown, attribution on screen, and original document URL. Leave missing attributions blank. Finding a similar chart is not enough to fill the gap with certainty.

That small exercise reveals what you actually need. A macro dashboard will not necessarily help reconcile an earnings table. Trace one number first, then note what made the process slow. That is a better basis for choosing tools than collecting subscriptions before you know the question.

Read the series

1. Where investing YouTubers get their numbers — this article
2. Follow earnings tables back to filings and investor relations
3. A macro chart needs more than a FRED link
4. What does “big money is buying” actually measure?
5. Rebuild the chart before accepting the conclusion

Footnotes

1. Kenneth R. French · Dartmouth College, Kenneth R. French Data Library. Accessed September 6, 2026. ↩

2. Ben Felix · Cameron Passmore · PWL Capital, Where do Stock Returns Come From? — Episode 140. Accessed September 6, 2026. ↩

3. Aswath Damodaran · NYU Stern, Valuation Online Class. Accessed September 6, 2026. ↩

4. Aswath Damodaran · NYU Stern, Useful Data Sets. Accessed September 6, 2026. ↩

5. PensionCraft, List of Trackers included as part of our Premium Membership. Accessed September 6, 2026. ↩

6. 한국은행, 경제통계시스템 ECOS. Accessed September 6, 2026. ↩

7. 한국은행, 김기열의 돈공부 4화 · 경제지표. Accessed September 6, 2026. ↩

8. Koyfin, Where do you get your data?. Accessed September 6, 2026. ↩