Method
Every trading day the site distills macro narratives from a flood of financial news, checks them against data, turns them into ETF direction calls, and settles every call in public simulated portfolios. This page explains how calls are made, what the terms mean, and how the portfolios are measured.
How a call is made
Read the news
Multilingual financial news is gathered daily and grouped into narratives.
Check the evidence
Narratives are checked against flows, futures positioning, options and macro data, not price alone.
Ask if it is priced in
A sound thesis the price already reflects is not chased. Late entries are flagged.
Settle daily
Every call enters a simulated portfolio, is marked at the close against a benchmark, and stays on file.
Terms
- Bullish / Bearish
- A call on price direction over the next one to three months. Neutral means no clear direction; mixed means the evidence is split.
- Confidence
- A number from 0 to 1. Historically, higher-confidence calls have been right more often.
- At high
- Price is near its 20-day high, so a new entry risks buying a short-term top.
- Narrative
- A thread of related coverage about one macro event, such as a central bank’s rate cycle. One narrative can affect several ETFs.
- Narrative state
- Nascent: just emerging; confirming: evidence building; actionable: evidence sufficient; contested: evidence conflicts; decaying: fading.
- Risk regime
- Credit spreads, volatility, rates and funding stress place the market in one of five states: risk-on, growth-scare risk-off, rate-driven risk-off, systemic stress or transition.
- Systemic crisis score
- 0 to 100, summed from credit-spread level and change, volatility and its term structure, and short-term funding stress. 0 means no signs of crisis.
- Z-score
- How many standard deviations today’s reading is from its one-year mean. Beyond ±2 counts as extreme.
The four simulated portfolios
- Fixed equal-weight: $5,000 per position across stocks, bonds and commodities.
- Non-rates · inverse-vol: Sized by inverse volatility, so wilder ETFs get less; no bonds.
- Rates · inverse-vol: Bond ETFs only, sized by inverse volatility.
- Rates futures: Rate views expressed with US and Canadian bond futures, risk capped per tenor by DV01.
Common rules
- Each portfolio starts with $100,000 of simulated capital; no real money is involved.
- Trades fill at the close on the day a call is published and are marked at every later close.
- Positions are held at least 14 days; they exit when the evidence flips, the call turns neutral, or after 90 days.
- A 30% loss triggers a stop at any point in the holding period.
- Benchmarks are total return (dividends included). Except for the futures portfolio, results exclude fees, slippage and taxes.
Limits
All content is generated by automated models and can be wrong. The simulated portfolios have a short history, so samples are small and past results do not predict future ones. Everything here is analysis of general markets, not personal investment advice. Full disclaimer →