Reference

Glossary

Every term the research uses, in plain English. The same definitions appear as hover and focus tooltips wherever a term is used; dotted underlines mark them. 81 terms.

200-day: The average closing price over the last two hundred trading days — the most widely watched measure of a market’s longer trend.
2s10s: The gap between the 2-year and 10-year Treasury yields. Normally the 10-year pays more; when it does not, the curve is inverted, which has historically preceded recessions.
3m10y: The gap between the 3-month and 10-year Treasury yields — the same idea as 2s10s, measured from the very front of the curve.
ALFRED: The archival version of FRED, which stores each statistic as it was originally published, before later revisions. It is what makes an honest historical test possible.
annualized: A short-period rate scaled up to what it would be over a full year, so a three-month change can be compared with a twelve-month one.
backwardation: When nearer contracts cost more than later ones — usually a sign of immediate stress.
basis point: One hundredth of a percentage point. A move from 4.00% to 4.25% is twenty-five basis points.
bp: Basis points — hundredths of a percentage point. Twenty-five bp is a quarter of one percent.
breadth: How many individual shares are participating in a market move. An index can rise on a handful of large companies while most shares fall, which breadth reveals and the index alone hides.
breakeven: The inflation rate at which an ordinary government bond and an inflation-protected one would pay the same. It is the bond market’s own forecast of inflation, readable every day.
Brier score: A measure of probability-forecast accuracy: the squared gap between each forecast probability and what actually happened, averaged. Zero is perfect; 0.25 is what always answering 50/50 scores. Lower is better.
CAEV: Confidence-adjusted expected value: an option structure’s modelled expected return, shrunk toward zero when the model’s confidence in that estimate is weak. The ranking key for published option structures — maximum payoff is shown but never ranked on.
CCC: The lowest tier of high-yield credit ratings, one notch above default. Because these borrowers are closest to trouble, their spreads move first and furthest when stress arrives.
claims: Initial jobless claims — the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits for the first time each week. The fastest honest read on whether the labour market is turning.
contango: When contracts for later delivery cost more than nearer ones — the normal shape for volatility, reflecting greater uncertainty further out.
Conviction: A 0–100 score for how strongly the evidence behind a name’s research holds together — data quality, model agreement, thesis durability. It is confidence in the work, not expected profit: a HOLD can carry high conviction and a BUY low conviction.
core CPI: Consumer price inflation excluding food and energy, whose prices swing for reasons unconnected to the wider economy. It is the more reliable read on the underlying trend.
core PCE: The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure: the PCE index excluding food and energy.
CPI: Consumer Price Index — the best-known measure of US inflation, tracking what a representative basket of goods and services costs.
DATA HOLD: The engine refusing to publish a fresh reading because a required input is missing or stale. Showing yesterday’s answer with today’s date would be worse than showing nothing.
DMA: Day moving average — the average closing price over a set number of past trading days, used to judge trend. A price above its 200-day average is conventionally an uptrend.
downside probability: The modelled chance that the 12-month total return is negative. Distinct from how LARGE a loss would be — a name can have low downside probability and a severe tail.
drawdown: The fall from a peak to the following trough. It measures the loss an investor would actually have lived through, rather than the return between two chosen dates.
DTE: Days to expiry — how long an option contract has left to run.
ES: Expected shortfall: the average loss across the worst tail of modelled outcomes (here the worst 5%). Deeper than "maximum loss is X" — it says how bad the bad cases are on average.
ETF: Exchange-traded fund — a fund whose shares trade on an exchange like a single stock.
expected alpha: The part of a stock’s expected return left over after subtracting what its risk alone should earn (the required return). Positive expected alpha claims the market is mispricing the name, not merely that it should go up.
expected return: The probability-weighted 12-month total return across the modelled scenarios, expressed as a percentage of today’s price. It already nets the downside scenarios against the upside ones.
fair value: The house estimate of what a share is worth today, triangulated from several valuation methods (discounted cash flow, peers, scenario weights) rather than taken from any single model.
fed funds: The overnight interest rate US banks charge one another, and the rate the Federal Reserve targets directly. Every other US interest rate is anchored to it.
FOMC: Federal Open Market Committee — the Federal Reserve body that sets US interest rates. It meets roughly every six weeks.
FRED: Federal Reserve Economic Data — the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s public database of economic statistics.
GDP: Gross domestic product — the total value of everything a country produces. The broadest measure of economic activity, and the slowest to arrive.
hedge sleeve: The portion of a portfolio held specifically to offset losses elsewhere, sized as a multiple of its normal level.
HY: High yield — bonds from companies rated below investment grade. They pay more because they default more often, so their spread widens fastest when credit conditions turn.
HYG: An exchange-traded fund holding high-yield corporate bonds. Widely traded, so its price reacts within the day to shifts in appetite for credit risk.
hysteresis: A damper on the action posture (Stance): a freshly flipped signal must persist before the published stance moves, so one noisy day cannot whipsaw the book. When the raw and published stance differ, the page says so.
IC: Information coefficient: the rank correlation between a signal’s ordering of names and their subsequent returns. 0 is no skill; sustained values above ~0.05 are considered real in cross-sectional equity work.
IG: Investment grade — bonds from companies the ratings agencies judge unlikely to default. The safer half of the corporate bond market.
implied vol: How much a price is expected to move in future, as inferred from what people pay for options on it.
IP: Industrial production — a monthly index of what US factories, mines and utilities actually produced. A direct read on the goods economy.
ISM: Institute for Supply Management — the body that publishes the best-known US purchasing managers’ surveys. Not available to this engine from any authorised source.
IV rank: Where today’s implied volatility sits inside its own 12-month range, 0–100. High IV rank means options are expensive by that name’s standards; it favours selling premium, not buying it.
IWM: An exchange-traded fund tracking the Russell 2000 index of smaller US companies, which are more sensitive to borrowing conditions.
LEAPS: Long-dated options, conventionally those expiring more than a year out. They give exposure to a view over a long horizon for a fraction of the capital.
LQD: An exchange-traded fund holding investment-grade corporate bonds — the safer counterpart to HYG.
margin of safety: How far the price sits below estimated fair value, as a percentage. A cushion for being wrong: the larger it is, the more the estimate can err before the purchase does.
MAS: The MCH Alpha Score — an unvalidated 0–100 diagnostic combining signal, fundamental and value blocks for names inside strict gates. Displayed for transparency while it accrues live evidence; nothing downstream trades on it.
MOVE: A measure of expected volatility in the US government bond market, the rates equivalent of the VIX. Not available to this engine from any authorised source.
NDX: The Nasdaq-100 index — the hundred largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq, dominated by large technology names.
NFCI: National Financial Conditions Index — a weekly measure published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago that combines over a hundred indicators of how easy or hard it is to borrow. Zero is average; positive is tighter than average.
OAS: Option-adjusted spread — the extra yield a corporate bond pays over government debt of the same maturity, after stripping out the value of any early-repayment options. It is the market’s price for the risk that the borrower does not pay.
PCE: Personal Consumption Expenditures price index — the inflation measure the Federal Reserve actually targets. It differs from CPI mainly in how it weights what people buy.
percentile: Where a reading sits in its own history. A ninetieth-percentile value is higher than ninety percent of everything that came before it.
PMI: Purchasing Managers’ Index — a survey of business purchasing managers, widely used as an early read on activity. This engine does not use one: no authorised source is available.
point-in-time: Using data exactly as it stood on the day being studied, rather than as later corrected. Without it, a historical test quietly uses knowledge nobody had at the time.
PoP: Probability of profit: the modelled chance an option structure expires worth more than it cost. A 90% PoP with a small gain and a ruinous 10% tail is still a bad trade — read it beside the expected loss measures, never alone.
pp: Percentage points — the plain difference between two percentages. Three percent rising to five percent is a move of two percentage points.
PWEV: Probability-weighted expected value: each scenario’s price target multiplied by its probability, summed. A single number standing in for the whole scenario tree — useful as a cushion measure, weak as a point forecast.
Rating: The published valuation verdict on a stock — STRONG BUY, BUY, HOLD, SELL or STRONG SELL. It answers "is the price attractive against our estimate of value" and nothing else; it is set by the valuation work, and the action posture (Stance) never alters it.
real yield: The interest rate after subtracting expected inflation — what a lender actually earns in purchasing power. It is the honest measure of whether interest rates are restrictive, because a high rate during high inflation may not be restrictive at all.
realized vol: How much a price actually moved over a past window, as against how much it was expected to move. Comparing the two says whether volatility was over- or under-priced.
risk/reward: The bull-case upside divided by the bear-case downside, both measured from today’s price. Above 1 means the modelled prize exceeds the modelled penalty; it says nothing about the probabilities of either.
RSP: An exchange-traded fund holding the same S&P 500 companies but weighting each equally. Comparing it with SPY shows whether gains are broad or concentrated in the largest few.
S&P 500: The index of the five hundred largest listed US companies, weighted by market value.
shadow: Running a model alongside the live system, recording what it would have said, while it drives no decision. It is how a claim earns trust before it is given any.
Sharpe: Return per unit of volatility — the expected excess return divided by how much the outcome swings. Rewards steadiness, punishes drama, says nothing about the direction of surprises.
SLOOS: Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey — the Federal Reserve’s quarterly survey asking banks whether they are making it harder or easier to borrow. It measures the supply of credit directly, rather than inferring it from prices.
SPX: The S&P 500 index — the five hundred largest listed US companies, and the usual shorthand for the US stock market.
SPY: The oldest and most heavily traded exchange-traded fund tracking the S&P 500. Used here as the index’s price series.
Stance: The portfolio action posture — Increase, Hold, Reduce or Exit — produced by a separate rules layer reading risk and momentum conditions. It answers "what would we do with an existing position" and is deliberately independent of the valuation verdict (Rating): a cheap stock can still warrant Reduce while its risk rules are tripped.
TIPS: Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities — US government bonds whose payments rise with inflation. Comparing them with ordinary bonds is what produces a breakeven rate.
Treasury: Debt issued by the US government. Treasury yields are the base interest rate everything else in markets is priced against.
variance premium: The gap between expected and actual volatility. When it is positive, sellers of options were paid more than the movement that followed turned out to be worth.
vintage: The dated run of the research engine a number was produced by. Two figures may only be compared, or accused of contradiction, when they share a vintage — a fresh number disagreeing with a stale one is a timeline, not an error.
VIX: The market’s expectation of how much the S&P 500 will move over the next thirty days, derived from option prices. Often called the fear gauge, though it measures expected movement in either direction.
VVIX: A measure of how much the VIX itself is expected to move — volatility of volatility. Not available to this engine from any authorised source.
XLP: An exchange-traded fund holding consumer staples companies — the things people buy regardless. Comparing XLY with XLP is a long-standing read on risk appetite.
XLY: An exchange-traded fund holding consumer discretionary companies — the things people buy when they feel comfortable.
yield curve: The line joining the interest rates on government debt of different maturities. Its shape says what the market expects interest rates and growth to do.
YoY: Year on year — comparing a figure with the same month a year earlier, which removes seasonal effects.