steam genre rotation
What it checks
When the Steam top-100 leans more heavily into a publisher's genre strength (think more action games for TTWO, more sports games for EA), that publisher's stock catches a bid. We classify games by keyword heuristics and track each genre's share of total concurrent players.
Mechanism
Gaming-publisher revenue is genre-concentrated (TTWO≈action, EA≈sports, MSFT/Activision≈shooter). When the Steam top-100 panel rotates toward a publisher's dominant genre — i.e. the share of total CCU coming from that genre rises 1σ above its 60d trailing mean — the publisher's addressable demand expands and equity drifts up.
Signal rule
Heuristic genre classifier on game_name (action/RPG/sports/sim/shooter/strategy/mmo/other); per-day genre-share = sum(CCU in genre G)/sum(CCU all); publisher's dominant G* derived from mapped roster; fire +1 long when share(G*) z>+1, -1 short when z<-1; 10d hold; lag-1 trading day.
Data dependencies
daily_pricesAdjusted-close OHLCV for every US-listed ticker; primary price feed.
steam_top_games_concurrentWorker data table — see services/worker schema.
steam_publisher_ticker_mapWorker data table — see services/worker schema.
Expected edge
- Paper alpha
- untested — internal
- Paper window
- T+0 to T+10d
Untested — internal. Target 30-80 bps annualized on the gaming-publisher subset.
Example tickers where this is likely to fire
Illustrative only — the signal fires based on the live data, not a fixed list.
Related families
steam publisher concurrency momentumAlt-dataLive-service games (GTA Online, Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone, EA Sports FC) monetize on per-day active player counts. A 30/90 concurrency ratio surge across a publisher's portfolio of linked Steam games predicts revenue beats 1-2 quarters out. We rank cross-sectionally across US-listed gaming publishers and trade the top / bottom deciles.
sector momentumMomentumIndustry/sector momentum (Moskowitz-Grinblatt 1999) is often stronger than stock-level momentum: long the stock when its sector ETF is in a strong uptrend. Three lookbacks swept (63d/126d/252d): position long when sector ETF close exceeds its close N days ago, flat otherwise.
index rebalance driftEventWhen a stock is added to the S&P 500, index funds must buy it on the effective date. The announcement (typically 3-5 trading days before) triggers a front-running rally averaging +8% by effective date. Deletions show a symmetric -4% drop. Both effects partially reverse in the 20 days after effective date. We trade adds long from (eff_date − 4d) through eff_date and short the reversal for 10-21d after; deletions get a 5d-lagged long for 21-63d on the overdone fade.
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