Data Coverage & Methodology

Data Sources

Goods trade data (imports and exports) is sourced from the U.S. Census Bureau International Trade API. We ingest data at the most detailed summary level (SUMMARY_LVL=DET) to capture individual commodity-country trade flows.

Services trade data is sourced from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) International Trade APIs — IntlServTrade for bilateral services by country and service type, and ITA (International Transactions Accounts) for broader balance-of-payments data.

Update Schedule

The Census Bureau typically releases monthly goods trade data with a ~2 month lag (e.g., January data becomes available in March). USTradeSignals checks Census daily and loads a month once every chapter of it is published, never while it is still being loaded.

BEA services trade data is updated annually, typically released mid-year for the prior calendar year.

Growth Calculation

Year-over-year (YoY) growth is calculated by comparing the current month's value against the same month in the prior year: growth_pct = ((current - previous) / previous) * 100

Opportunity Score

Opportunities are scored by combining trade value magnitude and growth rate: score = log10(value) * 0.6 + growth_pct * 0.4. This balances large established trade flows with fast-growing emerging ones.

Classifications

Products are classified using the Harmonized System (HS) at the 6-digit level, providing ~5,000 distinct commodity categories. Additional classifications include NAICS (industry), SITC, End-Use, and Hi-Tech categories.

How We Use AI

Some product, country, state, port, and district pages carry a short written summary, plus FAQs, generated by a large language model from the official trade figures on that page. AI is used only to describe the data in plain language — the numbers themselves are the underlying Census Bureau and BEA figures and are never produced, estimated, or altered by AI. Summaries are labeled where they appear, and we recommend verifying against the source tables before relying on them.