Today in Markets

What this page is

An individual set of statistics that an investor will generally check when they begin their trading day. All are based on the same licensed (and cache-based) data used for each of the tools available on this web site. None of these are a suggestion or a prediction; they are simply a status page. The release calendar information comes directly from official publications by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the Federal Reserve. The yield curve information comes from the Federal Reserve. Sentiment is based upon the published Fear & Greed Index. Funding costs are determined using a snapshot of perpetual futures pricing.

There is more to freshness in the rows than meets the eye. As much as the overall shape of the release schedule or macro environment changes (on decision days and when new data comes out), these will be largely unchanged from that point until they do change again. The curve of course will be updated at least once per business day, since this is how often the Fed releases a value. And sentiment will similarly update each day. But, the thing that moves the most rapidly here is funding, which is constantly being refreshed during the day, and is the freshest too; a very high funding rate could easily normalize over the course of several hours. So there is always a time stamp associated with each card, so you know exactly how long ago the numbers were generated.

How to read the funding extremes

Funding is the periodic payment between long and short holders of a perpetual future that keeps its price tethered to spot. Strongly positive funding means longs are paying shorts, the crowd is positioned long and paying for the privilege; strongly negative means the opposite. Annualised, the numbers look dramatic because a small hourly rate compounds across a year, so read them as a positioning gauge rather than a return you will actually earn. Extremes are worth noticing precisely because they tend not to persist.