Method
How this is built, and where it stops being reliable
A monitor whose method is published can be argued with. That is the point of this page — and it ships before the board is reachable, not after.
Methodology version asymmetric-investor-brief:2026-08 · cycle 2026-W34 · scope: United States
The pipeline
Source to page1 · Collect
Deep research runs against a fixed source hierarchy per indicator. Official publishers first; vendor and press only where no official series exists.
2 · Interpret
Structured extraction into a numeric register — one row per indicator per observation, with units, source and observation date.
3 · Accumulate
Rows append to a persistent register. Revisions write a new vintage; nothing is overwritten. State is computed from the register, not from prose.
4 · Compose
Narrative is written from the register. A claim with no backing row cannot be published, which is what makes the prose auditable.
The separation matters: numbers and words come from one record, so the sentence and the chart can never disagree.
Thresholds and their basis
Every level declares how it was set"Hard-won" is provenance, not a basis. Each threshold below declares one of: defined by the source itself, drawn from published literature, set at a historical percentile, calibrated empirically against prior episodes, or analyst judgement. Analyst judgement is legitimate and is labelled as such.
| Indicator | Warn | Trigger | Basis | Source tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ISM services PMI | 51 | 48 | Source defined | Official |
| High-yield OAS | 400 bps | 450 bps | Literature | Official |
| Shiller CAPE | 43× | 45× | Percentile | Official |
| S&P 500 top-10 weight | 43% | 45% | Percentile | Vendor |
| BDC discount to NAV | 30% | 35% | Percentile | Vendor |
| U6 underemployment | 8.8% | 9.5% | Empirical | Official |
| Private credit default rate | 7.0% | 8.0% | Empirical | Press |
| Margin debt, y/y | 22% | 30% | Empirical | Official |
| Auction indirect bid | 63% | 60% | Empirical | Official |
| 30-year Treasury yield | 5.50% | 5.75% | Analyst judgement | Official |
| Hyperscaler capex growth | 10% | 0% | Analyst judgement | Official |
| Effective tariff rate | 17% | 20% | Analyst judgement | Official |
Several triggers are conditional, not mechanical — the 30-year yield only counts as a fire if it bear-steepens while policy is easing; ISM requires three consecutive prints below 48. Conditions are shown on each row of the board.
What gets admitted
Inclusion rubricA candidate indicator must answer all nine before it renders. This exists so the second cut is not simply an accretion of whatever turned out to be fetchable.
- — Rationale: what question does it answer that nothing else does
- — Transmission channel: how does it reach a portfolio
- — Source tier: official, vendor or press
- — Cadence and publication calendar
- — Revision behaviour
- — History availability and depth
- — Threshold basis
- — Overlap with indicators already admitted
- — Licensing and redistribution rights
Declared gaps
Twelve indicators are a starting cut, not a macro framework. Known absences, stated rather than implied:
- — Inflation momentum and breadth
- — Policy-path expectations and real rates
- — Dollar and cross-currency funding conditions
- — Housing and consumer stress
- — Market breadth
- — Anything outside the United States
Four of the twelve admitted indicators are also universe-dependent — top-10 weight, BDC discount, private credit defaults and hyperscaler capex all depend on a defined constituent set that changes over time.
Track record
Published on one dated pageEvery claim about how this model has performed lives on the validation page and nowhere else, labelled by basis — live publication or retrospective simulation, never merged into one number. It is not repeated here, on the read, on the monitor or on the posture map, because a hit rate printed next to a live reading is read as a forecast of that reading.
Also on that page: the regime audit, the source-tier breach we have not resolved, and what would have to change for a live record to begin.
Validation record →Revision policy
Corrections logEvery observation is stored against the period it describes, when we retrieved it, and when the source published it. A revision does not edit the earlier row — it writes a new vintage and points back at the one it supersedes.
Consequence: history on this site shows the state that was computable at the time, not the state that is computable now. That makes the board less flattering and the record more usable.
- Observation date
- Period described
- Retrieved at
- When we fetched
- Source released at
- Publisher timestamp
- Vintage
- Monotonic per series
- Supersedes
- Prior vintage, or null
- Quality
- observed · provisional · revised · estimated · stale · unavailable
Why it matters commercially
A monitor that quietly restates last month's number is indistinguishable from one that got it right. The corrections log is the cheapest trust artefact available on a priced macro surface, and it is the reason the track record below can be labelled honestly.
It also constrains us: once a vintage is published it cannot be edited, only superseded. That is the intended effect.
Recent corrections
| Date | Indicator | Was | Now | Reason | Vintage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-19 | ISM services PMI | 54.3 | 54.1 | Source revision, July print | v2 |
| 2026-08-12 | U6 underemployment | 7.8 | 7.9 | BLS annual benchmark revision | v2 |
| 2026-07-29 | BDC discount to NAV | 24 | 25 | Composite constituent change | v2 |
◇ Illustrative. Requires the point-in-time vintage fields, which the pipeline does not emit yet.
Known limits
Read this before relying on any of itScope is the United States
Every deterministic source is a US publisher. The board is titled by scope for that reason. Jurisdiction pages carry non-US narrative, but no non-US indicator is admitted to the board.
Four of twelve have no reading
Margin debt, auction indirect bid, hyperscaler capex and the effective tariff rate are shown dark. The count is published on the board rather than quietly excluded from the denominator.
The aggregate is a compression
A single 0–100 posture over twelve heterogeneous series, four of them dark, loses information by construction. It is published next to the component board so it can always be checked against its parts.
Thresholds are candidates
Three of twelve rest on analyst judgement. They are labelled, and they are the first candidates for recalibration as history accumulates.
Two scenario vocabularies exist
The brief and the underlying state use different scenario sets that are not mappable one-to-one. Both are published until one is ratified; neither is silently preferred.
Directional, not quantitative
Stress scores order and compare conditions. They are not return forecasts, and no cell or score implies an expected magnitude over any horizon.
What this is, and is not
Macro data and analysis, published with its method. Not advice, and not tailored to anyone.
Asymmetric Investor publishes indicator readings, regime assessments and directional macro analysis. It does not make personal recommendations, does not assess suitability, and does not know or take account of any reader's circumstances, objectives or risk capacity, so there are no risk-profile tiers. What it will not do is name an individual security to buy or sell. Within that limit the analysis is meant to be useful: allocation at asset-class and sector level, risk-on and risk-off posture, and the basis for whatever any model suggests. What the data supports is published in full; what it does not support is labelled as absent.