CALDEIRÃO DE BOLSA

Bond rating is plagued by insularity. Agencies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's lack transparency, use narrow data sets, and rely on too few models (one of which was the notorious Gaussian copula formula featured on Wired's March cover). Worst of all, they're paid by the firms they evaluate — an obvious incentive for grade inflation.

Freerisk.org provides a platform for investors, academics, and armchair analysts to rate companies by crowdsourcing.

The site amasses data from SEC filings (in XBRL format) to which anyone may add unstructured info (like footnotes) often buried in financial documents. Users can then run those numbers through standard algorithms, such as the Altman Z-Score analysis and the Piotroski method, and publish the results on the site. But here's the really geeky part: The project's open API lets users design their own risk-crunching models.

The founders hope that these new tools will not only assess the health of a company but also identify the market conditions that could mean trouble for it (like the housing crisis that doomed AIG).