Market Memos · Where To Look
Macro Signals
What kind of market is this — and should you be pressing or smaller?
None of this tells you anything about a single stock. All of it tells you what sort of weather you are trading in, which is usually the more valuable of the two and almost always the more neglected.
Market internals
Price tells you where the index went. Internals tell you how many stocks came along. A rally on narrowing participation and a rally on broadening participation look identical on the chart and behave completely differently afterwards.
| Indicator | What it reads |
|---|---|
| $NYA50R $SPXA50R | Percentage of NYSE / S&P names above their 50-day. The plainest breadth measure there is. |
| $USHL5 | New highs minus new lows. Divergence against a rising index is the classic warning. |
| $NYMO $NYSI | McClellan Oscillator and Summation Index — breadth momentum, short and intermediate. |
| $VIX | Implied volatility on the S&P. Read alongside the futures curve — the shape matters more than the level. |
| $CPCE | Equity put/call ratio. A positioning read, best used at extremes. |
| $SKEW | What the options market is paying for tail protection. |
For a daily read of the same material rather than the raw charts: David Settle's Market Outlook.
The calendar, in three tiers
Sorted by how likely each is to move something you hold this week.
Tier 1 — dates that move individual names
- Earnings Hub and Earnings Whispers — earnings dates and expectations
- Ex-dividend dates — matters more for options positions than most people allow for
- Expiration and market calendar
Biotech has its own version of this tier — FDA dates, advisory committees and trial readouts — on Biotech Catalysts.
Tier 2 — dates that move the whole market
- Forex Factory economic calendar — the cleanest free view of scheduled releases
- CME FedWatch — what the market currently expects from the Fed, which is the number that matters rather than what anyone predicts
- Federal Reserve calendar and the hawk/dove cheat sheet
- Atlanta Fed GDPNow — a running nowcast rather than a forecast
- FRED — Fed balance sheet, JOLTS job openings, EIA weekly petroleum
Tier 3 — the high-frequency read
Data that moves before the official statistics do. Useful for noticing a turn early; useless for timing anything.
- Real vs Reported — a dashboard of the below, in one place
- TSA throughput · AAR rail traffic · Baker Hughes rig count
- Layoffs.fyi and the WARN Tracker — layoffs show up here before they show up in claims
Sentiment and valuation — at the market level
Worth separating clearly from single-stock sentiment, which is a different question on a different page. These measure the mood of the crowd as a whole.
- AAII sentiment survey — the classic retail read, and a contrarian one at extremes
- Shiller PE and Current Market Valuation — long-horizon valuation. These say nothing about the next twelve months and are routinely misused as if they did.
- Conference Board Leading Economic Index
House views worth reading
Free institutional research. Read it for the framing and the charts rather than the conclusions — everyone here has a book.
One that is not free, despite appearances: Yardeni Research is a paid subscription — four-week trial, no card required, and pricing not published on the site. Its chart library is excellent and it is frequently cited as though it were a public resource. If you want the same job done for nothing, FRED holds most of the underlying series and lets you build the charts yourself.
- Data: J.P. Morgan Guide to the Markets — the single most useful quarterly PDF in the business
- Equities: Goldman Sachs · BlackRock Investment Institute · Morgan Stanley
- Credit: Guggenheim · Neuberger Berman
- Quant and contrarian: AQR · GMO · Verdad · Hussman
- Global: UBS CIO House View · Julius Baer · DBS Asian Insights
Commentary worth the time
- The Big Picture — Barry Ritholtz
- The Weekly ChartStorm — Callum Thomas
- The Irrelevant Investor — Michael Batnick
- The Daily Shot — charts, daily, no narrative
- The Big Picture — IBD. Not a breadth column: it is a market-direction call built on IBD's own framework — relative strength, advance/decline, moving averages and their proprietary distribution-day count. Read it as one house's rules-based opinion, and know that the distribution-day method is theirs and not independently standard.
- MarketDiem — IBD's daily brief
- Almanac Trader — seasonality, taken with the appropriate pinch of salt
Single-name attention is on Sentiment Reads; filed transactions on Money Flows; platforms and screeners on Trading Tools. All five pages are indexed on Where To Look.
