Changelog

2026

• Sep 1 — Added an article on housing: mortgage rates are back to normal, prices are not. The 30-year is historically ordinary. The price is not.
• Aug 31 — Added articles: the wealth effect, then notes on CAPE versus Excess CAPE Yield, household crowding, recession gauges that do not vote, and what decade-ahead real returns looked like after readings like today’s.
• Aug 11 — Added household equity allocation — the share of household and nonprofit financial assets held in corporate equities (directly and via funds), from the Fed’s Z.1 accounts. A high reading is a classic crowding / late-cycle positioning signal and votes with the other sentiment gauges on the homepage YES/MAYBE and composite probability.
• Jul 28 — Added the interest rate model — a valuation gauge of S&P 500 position given the 10-year Treasury yield. It combines how far real prices sit from their trend with how far rates sit from their long-run average (plus a 2-D scatter of the same relationship). Complements the Excess CAPE Yield.
• Jul 27 — Added the S&P 500 price-to-sales ratio — what investors pay for each dollar of index sales — as a valuation gauge. A high reading means stocks are expensive relative to the revenue they generate, useful when earnings are noisy across cycles.
• Jul 20 — Added the 10y–3m yield curve — the classic Treasury spread behind the New York Fed’s recession-probability model — alongside the existing 10y–2y curve. When short-term yields rise above long-term ones the curve inverts, a pattern that has preceded every US recession since the late 1960s.
• Jul 17 — Added the Sahm Rule — a real-time recession indicator based on the three-month average unemployment rate versus its prior twelve-month low. A rise of 0.50 percentage points or more has historically marked the start of a US recession.
• Jul 13 — Added a FAQ page with collapsible answers for how the indicators work, what the verdicts mean, and definitions of valuation and statistical terms (Shiller CAPE, z-scores, standard deviation, percentiles, and more). Each entry has a stable anchor link, and relevant terms on the homepage, indicator, and composite pages now link straight to the matching FAQ definition.
• Jul 10 — Major methodology update. Added the Excess CAPE Yield — Robert Shiller’s rate-adjusted valuation gauge — as our eighth indicator, so the composite now accounts for interest rates. The Shiller CAPE and Tobin’s Q are now judged against a trailing 30-year baseline instead of their all-time average, adapting to structural regime shifts rather than assuming a quick return to century-old norms. The composite page now shows valuation and stress sub-scores with the range of indicator readings, plus a new “What happened next” section mapping past composite readings to the real S&P 500 returns that actually followed over the next decade.
• Jul 8 — Launched with seven valuation and stress indicators for the US stock market: Shiller CAPE ratio, the Buffett Indicator, Tobin's Q, S&P 500 ÷ M2, the VIX, the high-yield credit spread, and the yield curve (10y–2y). Each indicator gets its own page with live readings, full history, and methodology. We also added a composite overvaluation probability that blends all seven into a single gauge.