Macro Regime Dashboard — Live Signals & Historical Analogs

A VIX term spread of +3.33 between VIX3M (20.03) and VIX9D (14.07) tells you the options market is paying for protection three months out while shrugging at the next two weeks — and that gap is exactly the kind of signal this hub classifies, dates, and maps against prior cycles. The Macro Regime Dashboard tracks where the US economy sits across four working states — expansion, late cycle, contraction, stagflation — using a fixed set of weekly indicators rather than narrative commentary, and pairs each reading with the closest historical analog from the FRED archive back to 1962.

VIX: 16.70 | VIX3M: 20.03 | VIX9D: 14.07 | term spread: +3.33 (mild contango)
SPX spot 7473.47 | options-implied ±3.33% over next 30d expiry
SPX near-term implied: ±1.52% over 8d
QQQ spot 717.54 | options-implied ±5.09% over next 33d
SPX put/call OI ratio (next 3 monthlies): 1.62
Read: VIX term mildly upward-sloping (+3.33) — neutral vol regime. SPX options price ±3.33% over the next 30d expiry. SPX P/C OI ratio 1.62 — defensive / put-heavy positioning

What this hub covers

This page is the index for every weekly Macro Regime Dashboard piece. Each entry classifies the current regime on the basis of seven hard inputs — 10y-3m and 10y-2y Treasury spreads, the Sahm Rule unemployment trigger, ISM Manufacturing PMI, real M2 year-over-year, BLS payroll diffusion, and the CFTC commercials net position in S&P 500 e-minis — then names the historical window that most closely matches the current readings. The regime label is not a forecast. It is a label for the data on the table, dated to the week of publication, and revised the following Tuesday when new prints arrive.

Data sources and how the classification is built

Every series is pulled at the original source. Yield curve, M2, real personal income, and industrial production come from FRED. Payroll diffusion and the Sahm Rule numerator come from BLS releases the morning they cross. The CFTC Commitments of Traders report is parsed Friday evening for the legacy futures-only file. EIA weekly petroleum and gasoline stocks feed the stagflation check. SEC EDGAR 13F aggregate net buying and CBOE-listed VIX, VIX3M, VIX9D, and SPX options chains feed the positioning panel above. No aggregator pass-through. No third-party scrape.

The four-regime grid uses fixed thresholds set in 2024 and held constant since: a 10y-3m spread below -50 bps with a Sahm trigger above 0.50 puts the dashboard in contraction; ISM above 50 with real M2 positive year-over-year and Sahm below 0.30 holds it in expansion; a positive ISM print combined with EIA gasoline stocks tightening more than one standard deviation and headline CPI above 4% trips the stagflation label. Late cycle is the residual. Analog matching is a euclidean-nearest-neighbor search over the same seven normalized series, restricted to windows where the regime label was stable for at least eight weeks.

How to read the output above

• VIX term spread (+3.33): mild contango. Negative numbers — backwardation — historically precede the regime label flipping to contraction within four to six weeks.
• SPX ±3.33% over 30d: the straddle price for the next monthly expiry, expressed as a percent of spot. Compare to realized 30d to gauge whether the dashboard’s regime read is already priced.
• SPX near-term ±1.52% over 8d: shorter-dated implied move. A widening gap between 8d and 30d implied is the first place a regime shift shows up before the macro data confirms.
• P/C OI ratio 1.62: three-monthly-expiry put/call open interest, defensive at this level. Above 1.40 has accompanied every contraction-labeled week in the dataset since 2018.
• Regime chip row: the bolded chip on each weekly entry is the current label. The other three are shown to make backtesting the threshold logic explicit.

A worked example from this week’s reading

The current snapshot — SPX 7473.47, QQQ 717.54, VIX 16.70, term spread +3.33, P/C OI 1.62 — sits in the late-cycle bucket. The nearest analog by nearest-neighbor distance is the August 2018 – January 2019 window, where a similar VIX term structure and put-heavy positioning preceded a 19.8% SPX drawdown into the Christmas Eve low and a full retracement by April. The dashboard does not extrapolate that path to today; it surfaces the analog so the reader can pull the equity, credit, and commodity behavior of that window and decide what to do with it.

Latest Analysis

First weekly piece on Live macro regime classification, historical analogs arrives soon.

Related coverage

For the underlying rate and curve work, see the Treasury curve hub. The CFTC Commitments-of-Traders positioning hub holds the weekly commercials and large-spec breakdowns referenced above. Earnings-season impact on regime labels is tracked in the SEC EDGAR filings hub, and the small-cap rotation hub covers how Russell 2000 leadership behaves inside each of the four labeled states.