Fundamentals

Fundamental analysis works out what something should be worth from the economy behind it rather than from the shape of its chart. For the dollar and FX that means inflation, jobs, growth and what those force the central bank to do with interest rates. This page gathers every one of those releases — CPI, core PCE, PPI, non-farm payrolls, the unemployment rate, wages, job openings, GDP and consumer spending — alongside the Fed's policy rate, Treasury yields and futures positioning, so the whole picture sits on one screen.

Everything is pulled from official public sources with no paywall and no API key: the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for CPI, PPI, payrolls, wages and job openings; the Bureau of Economic Analysis for GDP, consumer spending and core PCE; the US Treasury for the daily nominal and inflation-protected yield curves; the New York Fed for the effective fed funds rate and the FOMC target range; and the CFTC for Commitment of Traders positioning. Prices come from public market data feeds.

The bias score runs from −100 (fundamentally bearish) to +100 (fundamentally bullish) for the instrument you have selected. It blends three channels: US macro data at 45%, the rates market at 30%, and CFTC futures positioning at 25%. Each channel is shown separately with its own score and a plain-English explanation, so you can see exactly where the number comes from and disagree with any part of it.

Each release is compared with its own last twelve readings rather than with a fixed threshold, because 3% inflation means something different after a decade at 2% than after a year at 6%. Half the score is where the latest print sits against that recent trend and half is which way it just moved, expressed in standard deviations and capped at ±1. That result is then flipped where a higher number is dollar-negative — a rising unemployment rate, for example — and weighted, so CPI and payrolls count for more than job openings.

Gold pays no interest, so its main competition is an inflation-protected government bond. The 10-year TIPS yield on this page is exactly that competition: the return you get after inflation. When real yields rise, holding gold costs you more in forgone income and gold usually falls; when they drop, gold usually rallies. That is why gold and silver are scored against real yields here while the FX pairs are scored against 2-year nominal yields, which track Fed expectations.

Commitment of Traders data shows what large speculators — hedge funds and money managers — are actually betting in the futures market, updated every Friday for the preceding Tuesday. Positioning moving in the same direction as the data confirms a trend, but positioning at an extreme means the crowd is already on that side and there is less money left to push it further. Any instrument whose positioning sits past ±75 of its three-year range is flagged as stretched.

The brief hands the model exactly the evidence shown on the page — every macro reading, the rates market, futures positioning, this week's scheduled releases and the latest related headlines — and asks it to join them up into a written read: what is driving the instrument, the case each way, what to watch next, and the single outcome that would break the view. It cannot invent numbers, and it is informational only, not financial advice.

Prices refresh every minute, the Treasury yield curve and fed funds hourly, and macro releases every six hours — new data appears as soon as the agency publishes it. Economic releases land on their own schedule: CPI and payrolls monthly, GDP quarterly, and COT positioning every Friday at 3:30pm ET.