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The recent denial by a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson of alleged human‑rights abuses in Xinjiang, coupled with the media spotlight on Starbucks’ decision to open stores there, illustrates how geopolitical events can quickly become market‑moving news. For quantitative traders, such events are a reminder that non‑financial signals—political statements, media narratives, and regulatory actions—must be integrated into high‑dimensional models to avoid hidden exposure and to capture short‑term alpha. The Need to Encode Geopolitical Signals Traditional factor models focus on macro‑economic variables, price histories, and firm‑specific fundamentals. A sudden diplomatic dispute, however, can create abrupt shifts in sentiment that are not captured by those variables....