Methodology

Sources, maths, biases.

Every chart on this site cites its data, its formula, and its update cadence.

Data sources

Source	Cadence	What we pull
FRED	Nightly 02:00 UTC	US monetary aggregates, Fed balance sheet, yields, fixings (WALCL, M2SL, RRPONTSYD, WTREGEN, DGS10, IORB, SP500…)
US Treasury Fiscal Data	Daily	TGA balance, debt-to-the-penny, securities issuance, public debt transactions.
Treasury TIC	Monthly (16th, 60-day lag)	Major Foreign Holders, long-term securities transactions, country holdings.
BIS	Quarterly	Locational Banking Statistics, Debt Securities Statistics, Global Liquidity Indicators.
BEA	Quarterly	International Transactions, bilateral trade in goods and services, FDI flows.
CFTC COT	Weekly (Saturday)	Non-commercial net positions for JPY, S&P 500 e-mini, 10Y notes, WTI, gold.
Stooq	Daily	Backup price feeds for indices, FX, commodities, crypto.
LBMA	Daily	Gold Price PM Fix in USD/oz (full history back to 1968). Successor to FRED's discontinued GOLDAMGBD228NLBM.
BLS	Monthly	CPI, Core PCE, NFP.
IMF	Quarterly	COFER (FX reserves composition), IFS, BOP.
BoJ / ECB	Daily/Weekly	JGB yields, BoJ holdings, Eurosystem balance sheet.

Computed metrics

Net Liquidity

Net Liquidity = WALCL − WTREGEN − RRPONTSYD

Carry Pressure Index

CarryPressure = normalize( (Fed Funds − BoJ Policy Rate) × |CFTC JPY net non-commercial position| )

Indexed Race

Indexed(t) = 100 × Series(t) / Series(t₀)

Cache & freshness

Series data is cached server-side for one hour after each ingest run; narrative copy is cached for 24 hours. Every chart card displays its last-updated timestamp directly from the database.

Annotations

Charts are layered with curated macro events (every QE round, FOMC pivot, BoJ surprise, debt-ceiling fight, COVID, SVB, August 2024 yen unwind, etc.). The seed list lives at content/annotations.json in the repo and is auditable in git.

How to add an annotation:

Permanent (audited): add an entry to content/annotations.json with ts, optional ts_end, title, description, category, importance (1–5), and series_ids (the source_id strings the annotation relates to). Run pnpm --filter @workspace/scripts run seed:annotations — the seeder is idempotent on (ts, title).
Ad-hoc (operator): use /admin/annotations to create, edit, or delete a row. Mutations revalidate the annotations cache so chart pages pick up the change on the next render — no redeploy.

Charts query annotations via getAnnotations({from, to, seriesIds, importance}) from lib/annotations.