Research
Notes on what the market is doing, and why.
Short, signed pieces on FX, rates, and macro. Each note is reviewed by an editor before it publishes. We do not issue trade recommendations. How we work →
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DXY finally moved. The data side took the wheel.
DXY broke 99 ahead of the Q1 GDP second estimate and the 7-year auction. Brent kept sliding, gold caught a bid, the 10-year rallied further. The data-not-dots thesis just printed.
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A plain-English guide to the dollar smile.
Stephen Jen’s three-regime framework for the dollar, the math behind the smile shape, and where DXY actually sits today between left-side risk-off, middle-trough underperformance, and right-side US exceptionalism.
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Confidence beat consensus, bonds rallied, dollar shrugged.
May Conference Board confidence printed 93.1 against a 92 consensus. The 10-year rallied 7 basis points. DXY closed flat. The data-side thesis is being expressed in rates now, not in FX.
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A plain-English guide to the term premium.
Decomposing a 10-year Treasury yield into the expected path of policy and the term premium, the math from the ACM model, and why the bucket has gone from deeply negative to firmly positive in this cycle.
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A new Chair, a record-low Michigan print, and the dollar still hasn’t moved.
Warsh was sworn in as the 17th FOMC Chairman. May Michigan sentiment was revised to 44.8, a record low. DXY at 99.24 has shrugged at both.
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A plain-English guide to COT positioning, with corn as the case.
How the CFTC Commitments of Traders report is built, the math that turns a raw net-long number into a percentile, and what May’s corn print is saying about a crowded long.
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Three sessions on: the dollar story is still about the data.
DXY held the line into the long weekend. The OIS path is unchanged. The cross-asset correlation matrix is doing the talking now.
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A plain-English guide to currency correlations.
What the correlation between two markets measures, how to compute it in five lines of arithmetic, and the one cell of today’s dollar matrix that’s gone the wrong way.
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EUR positioning has caught up to the dollar’s slide.
CFTC net longs in the euro have rebuilt from a 1-year low in March to an 18-month high. The easy carry on this side is gone.
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The dollar is weaker on the data, not the dots.
DXY has drifted off the March highs while OIS-implied policy is little changed. The slide is in the activity prints, not the Fed reaction function.
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Why the curve un-inverted without a recession.
Term-premium normalisation explains most of the bear-steepening. Growth surprise indices remain soft.
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A plain-English guide to OIS.
What overnight-index swaps measure, what they do not, and how to read them against fed-funds futures.
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