How USMacro selects indicators, assigns color thresholds, and presents economic data.
The USMacro heatmap displays 115 US economic indicators organized into 10 sections. Each indicator cell shows the most recent available value. All are color-coded by where that value falls relative to historically significant thresholds. The goal is to give investors an at-a-glance view of whether the macro environment is broadly supportive or broadly concerning for long-term equity investors.
The heatmap is not a trading signal. It does not tell you when to buy or sell. It tells you the current state of the macro environment — the backdrop against which investment decisions are made.
Each indicator is assigned one of five colors based on predefined thresholds. Most are fixed levels; eleven are the quintiles of a series’ own history up to the reading, so they move a little as data arrives, and one is colored only at its extremes. None follows model outputs. They reflect historically significant levels for each indicator.
The color thresholds are set based on historical analysis of what levels have been associated with favorable or unfavorable economic and market outcomes. Most thresholds are the levels that economists, the Federal Reserve, and market practitioners have historically used to assess each indicator. Of the 113 colour ladders behind the 119 heatmap cells, 11 are instead the quintiles of the series’ own history up to the reading being coloured (the Housing Cycle’s ten and retail money-fund flows). Today’s colour reads against the whole history, and a past month’s — in the Time Machine and the monthly tables — against the history up to that month. A colour starts once a series has ten years of history. The other 16 set against a series’ history are fixed levels chosen in June and July 2026 with the series’ whole history in view — an inflation band around the Fed’s 2% target, the zero line of a stress index. Each of those pages says what its levels mean and why they are fixed (two cells can share one ladder; the counts are the served ones). Residential Investment / GDP is colored only at its extremes: red below the 5th percentile of its own history up to the reading, green above the 95th, and neutral between.
For example, the VIX is colored Very Positive below 12 (rare and historically preceding complacency), and Positive between 12–20 (low fear, historically favorable). It is Neutral between 20–25, Negative between 25–35, and Very Negative above 35 (crisis level fear). These thresholds reflect decades of VIX research and market practice.
The exact thresholds for each indicator are documented on the individual indicator pages, accessible by clicking any cell on the site or from the section pages.
Color thresholds are documented on each indicator page. All but the 11 quintile ladders above are fixed — set once, none of them recomputed as the data moves; those 11 move a little as new data arrives, by their rule. Every sourced number traces to a public, authoritative source, and every figure the site computes is explained on its indicator page.
For some indicators, a higher value is bad rather than good. For example: high unemployment is negative, low unemployment is positive. High mortgage delinquency is very negative, low delinquency is very positive. The color coding accounts for this automatically — the direction of "good" is baked into each indicator's threshold definition.
Each cell displays three small vertical bars in the bottom-right corner — a mini sparkline showing the direction of the indicator over its three most recent readings.
The bars are always shown oldest on the left and newest on the right. Bar height is normalized relative to the indicator's own three-reading window — so the tallest bar always represents the highest of the three values, and the shortest bar represents the lowest. This means the bars show the shape of the recent trend, not the magnitude of change.
The time period each bar covers depends on how frequently the indicator is published.
| Display Label | Each Bar Represents | How Computed | Indicators |
|---|---|---|---|
| W | One week | Raw weekly release | Fed Balance Sheet, Money Market Assets, Chicago Fed Financial Conditions, AAII Bull-Bear Spread, Jobless Claims (Initial), Jobless Claims (Continuing), Mortgage Rate (30yr) |
| W | One week (averaged) | Daily series averaged into calendar weeks to reduce noise — each bar is the mean of all daily readings in that week | S&P 500 RSI, Nasdaq 100 RSI, VIX, US Dollar Index, Gold, WTI Crude Oil, Broad Dollar Index, EM Financial Stress (OFR), Financial Stress Index (OFR), Credit Stress (OFR), Real 5yr Yield (TIPS), 5yr Breakeven Inflation, 10yr Breakeven Inflation, 5y5y Forward Inflation, TED Spread (SOFR), Baa–10yr Spread, CP Rate (3-Month), CP–Tbill Spread, CP Financial–Nonfinancial Spread, HY Credit Spreads, IG Credit Spreads, Yield Curve (10yr-2yr), Crypto Fear & Greed |
| M | One calendar month | Raw monthly reading | Copper Price, Excess Bond Premium, CAPE: sigma vs trend, Buffett indicator: sigma vs trend, OECD Leading Indicator (US), ISM Manufacturing PMI®, ISM Services PMI®, CPI, PPI, Core PCE Inflation, Median CPI, Trimmed Mean PCE, Sticky CPI, Core Capex Orders, Fed Funds Rate, Cass Freight Index, Heavy Truck Sales, Retail Sales (ex Food Svc), Real Retail Sales, Industrial Production, Real Personal Income, Capacity Utilization, Real PCE Services, Smoothed Recession Probability, M2 Money Supply, Chicago Fed Activity Index, Durable Goods Orders, UMich Consumer Sentiment, Unemployment Rate, JOLTS Layoffs & Discharges, Nonfarm Payrolls, Private Payrolls, Services Payrolls, Goods Payrolls, ADP Private Payrolls, Construction Employment, Wage Growth, Job Openings (JOLTS), JOLTS Quit Rate, Sahm Rule Indicator, Jobs per Job Seeker, U-6 Unemployment Rate, Part-time for Economic Reasons, Home Prices (Case-Shiller), Current housing inventory, New Home Sales, Building Permits, Housing Starts, Existing Home Sales, Single-Family Permits, Single-Family Starts, Single-Family Under Construction, Single-Family Completions, Residential Construction Spending, Residential Construction Jobs, Months' Supply (New Homes), Housing Affordability (constructed), Business Loans, Consumer Credit, Personal Savings Rate |
| M | One calendar month (last trading day) | The closing value on the last trading day of each calendar month — each bar is one month-end data point, not an average | S&P 500 P/E (TTM), Shiller CAPE Ratio, Buffett Indicator |
| Q | One calendar quarter | Raw quarterly reading | Bank Lending Standards, Household Net Worth, GDP (Annualized), GDI (Annualized) |
Where the display cadence differs from the publication cadence, the rollup smooths short-term noise so the three bars convey a meaningful trend rather than three nearly-identical values. For example, daily-published credit spreads and noisy daily oscillators (VIX, RSI, Crypto Fear & Greed) are shown as weekly averages, and the monthly P/E series is shown at month-end values.
The following indicators do not display trend bars, because the comparison between periods would not be meaningful: Business Loan Delinquencies, Business Loan Charge-Offs, Berkshire Cash Reserves, Household Equity Allocation, GDPNow Nowcast, Manufacturing Weekly Hours, Services Weekly Hours, G7 Leading Indicator (OECD), Labor Force Participation, Commercial RE Delinquencies, Mortgage Delinquency, Home Prices (FHFA), Mortgage Debt Service Ratio, Residential Investment / GDP, All-Loans Delinquency (Banks), Credit Card Delinquencies, Consumer Loan Delinq., and Debt Service Ratio. Such cases include quarterly series where bars would span different forecast periods, and slow-moving series where bar-to-bar changes add no signal.
The bar color is always sky blue — it is a brand color, not a signal. Direction and signal strength are conveyed by the cell's background color (green = positive, red = negative), not by the sparkline.
Indicators were selected based on three criteria:
Indicators are organized into 10 sections that reflect distinct dimensions of economic health:
All data is sourced from public, authoritative institutions. The primary source is FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data), maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: 92 of the 115 series come through it. Additional sources include the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, the University of Michigan, AAII, and others. The sources and series IDs of the 115 heatmap indicators are listed on the Data Sources page.
The site updates daily. Individual indicators update on their own schedules — some daily (VIX, yield curve), some weekly (jobless claims, AAII sentiment), some monthly (CPI, unemployment, NFP), and some quarterly (GDP, household net worth). Each indicator page documents the specific update frequency.
The Time Machine feature allows you to view the heatmap on any date since 1990; a cell whose series had not yet begun, or had nothing published yet, is blank. On a day the site recorded its live heatmap, the Time Machine shows that record. The site’s record of its live pages begins on October 10, 2026. On other days, each cell shows the newest observation that had been published by the picked day. The site’s release calendar dates every stored observation: the agency’s release day where an archive records it, the producer’s schedule, or the day the site itself first stored the row. So a monthly figure published two weeks after its month appears from the day it was published, not from the first of its month. The value is the one known that day where the site holds an archive of first prints, and today’s revised value otherwise. Those archives are ALFRED for payrolls and the employment family, GDP, core PCE, jobless claims, industrial production and others, and the site’s own first-print archive for recent months. In this worked-out view, constructed affordability reads its as-published version — the latest published income year, not the interpolation its chart uses. The colours use the fixed levels, and for the 11 quintile ladders the history up to the observation shown (a series in its first ten years is uncoloured). A snapshot of today is the live heatmap.