Twelve pillars, three engines. The method itself.
Twelve hours.
The launch window on the Diagnostic Dozen Discount rate closes tomorrow, April 21, at 9:30 AM ET. This is the lowest you’ll be able to lock in the real-time application of the framework. Subscribers will get 200+ charts and 10,000+ words a month, plus the model portfolio, live-tracked and audited vi
Sentiment & Positioning: The Contrarian Edge
The AAII Bull-Bear spread printed -7.3% for the week ending April 8, the fourth straight week of elevated bearish readings. But the VIX sits at 19.2, 14% below its 50-day moving average. The VIX/VIX3M term structure is in deep contango at 0.88. Breadth has repaired: 54% of S&P 500 stocks are above...
Market Structure: The Weight of Evidence
On Wednesday, the S&P 500 ripped 2.51% on a ceasefire headline, its best day since April 2025. On Thursday, it tacked on another 0.62% to close at 6,824. Seven straight days up. The longest winning streak since October. The index reclaimed both its 50-day and 200-day moving averages in 48 hours....
Plumbing: The Invisible Infrastructure
On September 17, 2019, something broke. Not in the economy. Not in the stock market. In the pipes underneath them. The overnight repo rate, a number that most people have never heard of and fewer still could define, spiked from 2.43% to a published benchmark of 5.25%, with intraday transactions...
Financial: The Cascade
Previously in this series: Labor: The Source Code | Prices: The Transmission Belt | Growth: The Second Derivative | Consumer: The Last Domino | Housing: The Collateral Engine | Business: The Forward Commitment | Trade: The Transmission Belt | Government: The Fiscal Overhang The Fed sets a rate....
Crypto Liquidity Impulse
Most liquidity indicators tell you where the ocean is. We built one that tells you which way the current is running. Everyone has a liquidity model now. Global M2. Net liquidity (balance sheet minus TGA minus RRP). The Hayes framework. The Alden framework. They all capture something real, and we...
Government: The Fiscal Overhang
The Diagnostic Dozen Educational Series Previously: Labor | Prices | Growth | Consumer | Housing | Business | Trade Everyone talks about the Fed. Not enough people talk about the entity that actually moves the most money through the system: the U.S. Treasury. The Federal Reserve sets the price of...
Trade: The Pipeline
Previously in this series: Labor: The Source Code | Prices: The Transmission Belt | Growth: The Second Derivative | Consumer: The Last Domino | Housing: The Collateral Engine | Business: The Forward Commitment Trade is where domestic policy meets global reality. Every tariff, every currency move,...
Business: The Forward Commitment
Previously in this series: Labor | Prices | Growth | Consumer | Housing Business investment is the most honest macro signal. Consumers spend out of habit. Governments spend out of inertia. Businesses spend out of conviction. When a CEO signs a purchase order for $50 million in equipment, that is...
Housing: The Collateral Engine
Previously in this series: Labor | Prices | Growth | Consumer Housing is not shelter. It is the financial system’s collateral backbone, the Fed’s primary transmission channel, and the single most rate-sensitive sector in the economy. Miss it, and you’re trading the economy of 2024 while living in...
Consumer: The Last Domino
Previously in this series: Labor | Prices | Growth The consumer is not a leading indicator. It is a lagging confirmation of what labor, credit, and confidence already told you. And it represents 68% of GDP. That is the paradox. Personal Consumption Expenditures is the single largest component of...
Growth: The Second Derivative
GDP gets all the attention. It also gets everything wrong. By the time the Bureau of Economic Analysis tells you the economy grew 2.3% last quarter, you are looking at data that is 30 days stale, will be revised twice, and averages together components moving in opposite directions. GDP is a lagging...
Prices: The Transmission Belt
Inflation doesn’t negotiate. GDP can disappoint and the Fed shrugs. Employment can soften and they wait for confirmation. But if inflation stays elevated, the Fed stays restrictive. There is no discretion here. Inflation is the only macro variable that directly controls the policy rate, and the...
Labor: The Source Code
There is no economy without labor. This is not a metaphor. People make things, build things, produce things. It is the literal foundation on which everything else rests. When we talk about economic cycles, we are really talking about labor cycles dressed up in different clothes. The transmission...
Why Most Americans Don’t Care About Your Market Call (And Why That Matters)
Most macro commentary ends the same way: “...so we’re overweight equities” or “...which is why we prefer duration.” That’s fine if you’re managing a portfolio. It’s what I do. Last week, I launched Lighthouse Crypto Macro with live-tracked positioning. The whole global macro book, covering equities...
⚓ Liquidity Transmission Framework
Mapping the Transmission from Treasury Markets to Crypto Collateral ⸻ As Lighthouse rolls out its Advisory Offerings, we’re publishing the backbone of our liquidity architecture — a model that tracks how stress flows through the system, from Federal Reserve plumbing to crypto collateral capacity....
Long-form. One thesis, taken all the way down.
The Fed Put, Retired
For fifteen years every selloff was bought on the same faith, that a chair stood behind the tape ready to rescue it. That chair takes his seat Wednesday, and he spent his career arguing against the rescue. The wrinkle is that disinflation is finally showing up, the one thing that usually buys the cu
Markets Turn in Order
The leading reads were flashing for weeks while credit and volatility slept. Friday was the tape catching up to an inside that had been coming apart since February. Markets do not turn all at once. They turn in order. The leading parts go first, quietly, in the places that never make the front...
The Widest Page in the Book
20% off Yearly Subscriptions ends on Friday! Subscribe now to lock in the price. 1. The Widest Reading We’ve Ever Seen The May print of the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers settled at 44.8 . That is the lowest reading the survey has ever produced. Below the 1980 stagflation trough at...
The Honest Level
Executive Summary Term premium on the 10-year Treasury sits at roughly 70 basis points. A year ago it sat at 40. Five years ago it sat below zero. The drift is in one direction. We anchor the framework’s honest level at 150bps. It is the median reading from 1970 to 2007, and we use it because the...
Earnings Week, Macro Week
96 hours that test the read There are weeks where a lot of small things happen, and there are weeks where the whole economic story compresses into a single window. This is the second kind. Over the next ninety-six hours, we get the Federal Reserve decision, the four largest companies in America...
Two Economies
The Beacon · April 20, 2026 On Friday , we wrote the companion piece ahead of schedule. Three other writers had each moved the ball that week, and the conversation was ready for it. We promised the full chart pack would drop Sunday. A weekend hardware issue had other plans. Here it is Monday, with...
The Reflexive Bid
The macro herd is obsessed with “SVB 2.0” and duration mismatch risk. Banks sitting on unrealized losses. Long-dated securities underwater. The narrative writes itself. What they’re missing: the same mismatch creating the risk is now creating a mechanical, involuntary bid for US Treasuries. This...
The Beacon | Banking On Nonbanks
The conventional narrative about financial intermediation is fundamentally wrong. For decades, analysts have watched bank-led finance decline while nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs) surge, interpreting this as a structural shift toward a nonbank-centric system. But a new paper from the Federal...
The Beacon | It's Getting Spooky
TL;DR Surface calm, shrinking cushion: funding looks orderly today, but the Federal Reserve’s Overnight Reverse Repurchase Facility (ON RRP) and bank reserves — our system’s shock absorbers — are materially thinner. Leading labor flows (quits, hires/ quits, hours worked) are rolling over even with...
The Beacon | The Last Mile of Disinflation
Lighthouse Macro Macro, Illuminated. A New Rhythm After several weeks rebuilding my research process and workflow, Lighthouse Macro relaunches today with a consistent publishing cadence structured around how I analyze and trade global macro themes. Each element has a defined role: Sundays → The...
From Foundations to Fault Lines — Part III
Earlier in this series: Part I: Cracks in the Foundations Part II: Collateral Fragility Part III: Seemingly Stable, Systemically Stressed
From Foundations to Fault Lines — Part II
Earlier in this series: Part I: Cracks in the Foundations Part II: Collateral Fragility Part III: Seemingly Stable, Systemically Stressed
From Foundations to Fault Lines — Part I
In this series: Part I: Cracks in the Foundations Part II: Collateral Fragility Part III: Seemingly Stable, Systemically Stressed
Bullion Brilliance
Introduction The nuanced global picture is a testament to investors’ trust in gold, which gains appeal during broad political and economic uncertainty. Despite the fact that it doesn’t generate yield or pay dividends, gold has outperformed stocks and crypto by a wide margin over the past twelve...
The Vanishing Job-Hopper Premium
Executive Summary The conventional wisdom that changing jobs leads to significantly higher wages is being challenged by recent data. As of early 2025, the wage premium for job-switchers has narrowed to just 0.2 percentage points—a dramatic departure from historical norms. This analysis explores the...
Navigating Trade Tensions
The US-China trade landscape has shifted dramatically by February 2025, with Trump’s 10% tariff on $300 billion in Chinese imports (effective February 4) sparking retaliatory tariffs on $20 billion in US LNG and agricultural goods. Rooted in a five-year decoupling trend, this escalation threatens a...
The U.S. Housing Market in 2025
Hi all, The following was originally published in the Weekly Observations report for Strom Capital Management which was sent to clients last week. I wanted to give you all the chance to read it as well. Enjoy! The U.S. housing market stands at a critical juncture in early 2025, with mounting...
New Year, New Paradigms
By Bob Sheehan, CMT, CFA As we settle into 2025, the economic landscape presents a fascinating puzzle of resilience and vulnerability. As of yesterday morning, the latest data from the Commerce Department indicates that U.S. retail sales rose by 0.4% in December 2024, reaching a total of $729.2...
Cracks Beneath The Surface
Hi folks! My apologies for such a long gap between posts. I am going to give you a bit longer of a report today in return. I’m hoping to try to work out a more regular schedule and cadence to these posts over the holidays. I’ll be sure to let you all know! Executive Summary The story of 2024 was...
Labor Woes, Growth Slows
Employment is a key driver of Real GDP. With sequential weakness we've seen in employment data recently, there’s been a divergence between Labor and Output as labor markets are trending lower while output remains firm. While September & October are typically stronger months for hiring, any further...
The Dollar vs. Gold & Real Yields
Historically, rising Real Yields have corresponded with outperformance by the Dollar while Gold lags. However, in the past 18 months, we've observed a notable deviation from this norm. The Dollar's peak relative to gold occurred in the fall of 2022, after which gold has significantly outperformed...
Fast reads on the print that just hit.
Two Prints In One Release
The deal closes tomorrow. Lock it in now! 1. Two Numbers, One Release The Bureau of Economic Analysis released the April Personal Consumption Expenditures price index at 8:30 this morning. Core PCE printed 3.3% year over year, in line with consensus and the highest reading since October 2023....
The Long End Broke Five. Credit Hit Snooze.
The annual rate is 20% off right now. $400 a year, down from $500. One market is repricing risk in real time. The other two are asleep. This Beam is the whole read: where the stress actually sits, the mechanism underneath it, what the consensus is missing, and what we are doing about it in...
The Records Don't Agree With the Tape. The Fed Just Changed Hands.
Lighthouse Macro is not a market newsletter. It is a twelve-pillar diagnostic system. We built the whole thing and published all twelve pillars free, the mechanics and the thresholds, one at a time. The framework is open. That build is done. Now it runs live. The portfolio is Crosscurrents , funded...
AI Is Fragmenting the Cycle
The Setup This morning’s GDP advance came in at 2.0% annualized, a real upside surprise against GDPNow’s 1.2% nowcast and a meaningful reacceleration from Q4’s 0.5%. The internals tell the story the headline buries. Investment accelerated. Consumer spending decelerated. The cycle is not lifting. It...
The Rally Has Two Tells
The S&P closed at a record yesterday, 7,174. Thirty days ago it was below trend and our Market Structure Index sat at −1.99, deep in broken territory. Yesterday MSI printed +1.12. That is a 3.1 z-score swing in a month. We do not see swings like this outside of 2020. Consensus is reading the rally...
The Broadening Broke
The tape looks clean. The internals narrowed. The S&P 500 closed at 7,137.90 on Wednesday, a fresh record. JPM lifted year-end to 7,600 on Monday. The VIX just completed a 44% compression in three weeks, from 31.05 on March 27 to 17.48 on April 17, one of the sharpest on record. The tape reads...
A 1.7% Print, a 0.14% Tell
Retail sales surged. The service line didn’t. March retail sales rose 1.66% month over month, the biggest monthly gain in more than a year, and twelve of the report’s thirteen categories were green. The control group, the measure that feeds directly into GDP, climbed 0.76% against a 0.2% consensus....
Stocks Printed a Record. Bonds and Gold Didn't Buy It.
The Beam | April 16, 2026 The S&P 500 closed April 15 at 7,022.96. A new all-time high. A ten percent rally off the late-March lows. The narrative is clean. Ceasefire, vol crushed, risk on, systematic funds re-leveraging into the bid. We’re seeing flows everywhere. We’re not seeing conviction....
The Silent Capitulation: ETF Exodus vs. On-Chain Accumulation
If you missed it earlier today, our 3rd installment in the Macro Framework series: Growth: The Second Derivative . Now, our thoughts on Bitcoin… BTC is currently trading at $63,700, reeling from a brutal intraday flush that has liquidated over $1.4 billion in leveraged positions over the last 24...
The Beam & LNMS Report
For anyone who missed it: Less Noise, More Signal released their year-end “macro voices” report, and I was fortunate to be included alongside a strong group across TradFi and DeFi. My section touches on the data deluge investors now face — and why only a durable, disciplined framework can keep...
The Beam | Treasury Buybacks & The Mechanical Basis Squeeze
When Predictable Plumbing Becomes Profitable Signal The Mechanical Architecture Treasury buyback operations represent one of the last genuinely predictable microstructure arbitrages in global fixed income markets. Each bi-weekly operation creates a mechanical compression event where off-the-run...
Chaos in China
Investors returning from China's Golden Week holiday were initially greeted with what appeared to be an auspicious sign: a remarkable 10% jump in the CSI 300 index before the highly anticipated press conference of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). The NDRC is the agency that...
Monetary Monday
As central banks around the globe have begun to reduce interest rates, there's mounting pressure on the Federal Reserve to do the same. While the July Fed meeting may be too soon for a rate cut, it wouldn't be surprising to see one announced by September. Let's delve into various assets that are...
Positioning, in the open.
POSITIONING UPDATE: FEBRUARY 23, 2026
HOW ARE WE DOING: JANUARY 15 TO TODAY On January 15, we published “ Playing Defense in a Hollow Rally. ” Our macro risk assessment was elevated. We called for underweighting equities, overweighting defensives, avoiding the long bond, and said VIX in the mid-teens was complacent. Here is what...
Positioning Update: Playing Defense in a Hollow Rally
I wanted to follow up on the January Horizon with the “so what”: how I’m translating the narrative into actual positioning. After a productive call with a Founding Member this week, I wanted to offer this level of tactical detail to other subscribers as well. Here is how we are translating this regi
The data, laid out to be looked at.
The Lighthouse Macro Chartbook
June opened with the market doing the one thing it only does at turns. It started sorting. A real-rate regime, the ten-year real yield up near the high end of its fifteen-year range, does not hit every asset the same way. It crushed gold. It carried the long end. And underneath a tape that looked...
The Fragile Record
The tape at a record. The diagnostic dozen at late cycle. The S&P 500 printed a record this week. Every pillar in our twelve-pillar framework is flashing late cycle. That gap is the story. Price is the last variable to turn. The flows under it turned quarters ago. This edition runs the diagnostic...
The Chartbook - November 23, 2025
Equities sit near record highs while leading indicators continue their steep decline. The divergence is widening, not narrowing. This week’s Chartbook documents the divergence and what breaks first. Inside Section I: Proprietary Systemic Risk Indicators My Macro Risk Index (MRI) sits at +0.06σ,...
The month ahead, and where the risk sits.
Markets Turn in Order, and the Order Is Almost Done
The yield back-up is real and it is fiscal, not a price scare, and that one fact sorts the whole tape. The leaders flashed for weeks. The laggards are catching down on schedule. Two June catalysts, a CPI print and Kevin Warsh’s first meeting in the chair, both cut the same way. The book is built...
The Splitting Cycle
The Horizon · May 2026 The full Horizon normally sits behind the paywall. This one runs free as the launch piece for the stack we’re building around the framework. Executive Summary Q1 2026 real GDP grew 2.0% annualized. Roughly 1.1 percentage points of that, more than half of the entire print,...
THE HORIZON | JANUARY 2026
The S&P 500 has printed fresh highs above 6,900. Volatility is subdued. Credit spreads are tight. On the surface, markets look stable. Under the hood, the system’s shock absorbers are gone. This is The Hollow Rally : a regime in which asset prices continue to levitate on residual liquidity, position
Early notes and announcements from the archive.
The Foundation Is Set. Now We Build.
April 14, 2026 If you’ve been here since January, you already know. We took our time. Twelve pillars. Three engines. Months of work before we ever asked anyone to pay for a subscription. That was deliberate. Most newsletters launch with a hot take and a paywall. We launched with a framework. A full...
Introducing: Lighthouse Macro Crypto
Lighthouse Macro Crypto We’ve been invited to join Botsfolio as a Pro Portfolio Creator. This is our public-facing Lighthouse Macro Crypto Portfolio. Link: Sign up with this link for 20% discount! (Or apply coupon code=bobe8f) Why We’re Doing This Some of you run crypto-only mandates. Crypto...
Building the Intelligence Layer
Lighthouse Macro continues with public markets at its core — now extending its macro and liquidity framework into private-market intelligence through the Allocation Innovation Partnership (AIP). It’s Been an Exciting Few Weeks I’ve joined the Global Capital Institute as Founding Chief Investment...
Welcome to Lighthouse Macro
Welcome to Lighthouse Macro Welcome to Lighthouse Macro, where data-driven insights illuminate the path to strategic investment. I’m excited to introduce this new blog, dedicated to offering a disciplined analytical approach to investment strategy, grounded in the rigorous intersection of...