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History
The gap: speculation vs. reality
Speculative Excess percentile minus Real Activity percentile. The dashed +70 line has been breached in only two eras since 2000: 2001, and 2025–26. Follows the period buttons above; hover to time-travel.
Pillar breakdown
FOMC pricing via Kalshi
Probability-weighted expected rate change per upcoming FOMC meeting, derived from live Kalshi prediction-market prices.
| Meeting | P(cut) | P(hold) | P(hike) | Expected Δ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-16 | 3% | 41% | 55% | +13.3bps |
| 2026-10-28 | 10% | 60% | 30% | +4.6bps |
| 2026-12-09 | 6% | 65% | 29% | +6.1bps |
| 2027-01-27 | 6% | 76% | 18% | +2.0bps |
| 2027-03-17 | 14% | 65% | 22% | +2.0bps |
| 2027-04-28 | 15% | 60% | 25% | +6.9bps |
Methodology
Pillar 1 — Real Activity (25%): Initial jobless claims, continued claims, temp-help employment YoY, heavy truck sales, building permits.
Pillar 2 — Credit Market (20%): HY OAS spread, 10y-3m yield curve, real 10y TIPS yield.
Pillar 3 — Market Regime (15%): S&P 500 vs 200-DMA, VIX, copper/gold ratio.
Pillar 4 — Money & Credit (15%): M2 6-month annualized, M2 YoY, real M2 YoY, H.8 C&I loans YoY.
Pillar 5 — Monetary Regime Pricing (15%): 5y5y breakeven, 10y breakeven, Fed funds vs Taylor-rule gap, 1-year yield vs Fed funds. Kalshi FOMC pricing is displayed above but deliberately not scored — it has no pre-2021 history, and scoring it would break the apples-to-apples backtest.
Pillar 6 — Speculative Excess (10%): Composite of four gauges, each a percentile vs its full 1950+ history: Shiller CAPE, household equity allocation (Fed Z.1), margin debt / GDP, and the Buffett indicator (corporate equities / GDP).
Scoring: Each daily reading is rank-ordered against the full 2000-present history. 100 = best ever observed. 0 = worst ever observed. Median = 50 by construction.
Revisions: Historical readings are rank-rescaled against the full sample every day, so past values can shift slightly as new data arrives and sources revise. Shaded bands on the charts are NBER recessions.
Sources: FRED · Yahoo Finance · Kalshi public API · multpl.com (CAPE) · BEA · BLS. Backtest uses only data available at each historical date (no look-ahead bias). Auto-updates daily at 5:30 PM ET.