Direct Answer
Swoopr Market Health Index is a 0-100 structural health reading that looks beneath headline index performance to participation, trend quality, credit, volatility structure and concentration. It is designed to answer one narrow question: Is the market actually healthy underneath the headline index? The output is educational market context, not a forecast, recommendation, or promise of future returns.
Why Swoopr Is Building This
Price tells the investor what the index did. Market Health asks whether the move is supported by enough of the market to deserve confidence. The score is deliberately structural, not predictive: a healthy market can still fall tomorrow and an unhealthy market can rally. Its value is in identifying whether the visible headline is being confirmed or contradicted underneath.
Swoopr already publishes market tools, a live proprietary Fear and Greed gauge, a sentiment dashboard, macro and regime education, portfolio diagnostics and a market-history library. This product makes one missing question measurable, explainable and reusable across the site. The canonical page functions as an interactive tool, a methodology document and a durable educational reference.
The design principle: one score answers one question. Fear and Greed continues to describe sentiment. Volatility continues to describe expected or realized movement. This product does not absorb those meanings. It may use related inputs, but its label, methodology and explanation remain distinct.
What It Measures
The model draws from the following evidence families:
- Advance/decline participation
- New highs versus new lows
- Share of securities above 20-, 50- and 200-day moving averages
- Equal-weight versus capitalization-weighted performance
- Small- and mid-cap participation
- Sector participation
- Credit-spread conditions
- Volatility structure
- Leadership and concentration
The objective is not to maximize the number of inputs. It is to capture independent information. Every candidate input needs an independence rationale in the methodology registry explaining what unique information it adds and what other components it overlaps with.
Scoring Methodology
Each component is normalized to a 0-100 historical percentile score based on a rolling window spanning multiple market regimes. For a raw value x:
component_score = percentile_rank(x within approved history) * 100
Where a higher raw value represents worse conditions, the score is inverted:
adjusted_score = 100 - component_score
The composite across active components is:
composite = sum(weight_i * adjusted_score_i) / sum(active_weight_i)
Only components with fresh, valid data are active. The component registry stores the source timestamp, Swoopr ingestion timestamp, current methodology version and a freshness service level agreement. Missing data are never converted to a neutral score.
Coverage and confidence
Every reading publishes coverage separately from the score. If 70% of approved component weight is available, coverage is 70% and the score is not silently re-scaled. The product uses terms such as Full coverage, Partial coverage, Stale component and Methodology fallback rather than a generic confidence percentage.
Interpretation Bands
| Score range | Label |
|---|---|
| 0-24 | Severely weak |
| 25-39 | Weak |
| 40-59 | Mixed |
| 60-74 | Healthy |
| 75-100 | Broadly healthy |
Bands are communication aids, not natural laws. A move from 59 to 60 should not be described as a fundamental break in market reality. The reading always shows the numeric value, trend, component contributions and the prior reading so the user sees continuity rather than artificial cliffs.
How to Read It
Beginner
Three questions answered without jargon: What is the reading? Is it improving or weakening? What is driving it? One-paragraph interpretation and at most three major drivers. Technical terms link to Swoopr glossary definitions. The explanation says what the measurement describes, not what to buy or sell.
Intermediate
Each component family shown with its current score, trend, weight and contribution. Charts covering 1 month, 3 months, 1 year and maximum history when source data allows. Divergences highlighted: a composite can remain stable while one important family deteriorates and another improves.
Advanced
Raw series identifiers, transformations, lookbacks, normalization method, active weights, timestamps, missing-data rules and methodology version. Downloadable methodology JSON and a machine-readable snapshot endpoint.
FAQ
Is Swoopr Market Health Index a buy or sell signal?
No. It describes the structural condition named by the tool and does not recommend a transaction. A high or low reading can persist, and markets can move against the historical pattern associated with any indicator.
Why use a 0-100 scale?
A common scale makes heterogeneous inputs understandable and allows consistent comparison across Swoopr products. The scale does not mean 80 is twice as good as 40, nor does it represent an 80% chance of a market outcome.
What happens when data are missing?
The affected component is excluded under a predefined rule, coverage falls, and the product shows this to the user. Missing data are not converted to a neutral score.
Does a high score predict higher returns?
No. The score answers: Is the market actually healthy underneath the headline index? It is not a return forecast and should not be validated by cherry-picking periods in which the market subsequently moved favorably.
How is this different from Fear and Greed?
Fear and Greed measures sentiment. Swoopr Market Health Index answers a different structural question. The two are cross-linked but their labels and methodologies remain distinct.
References
- S&P Dow Jones Indices: S&P U.S. Indices Methodology
- Cboe: VIX Volatility Products
- FRED: ICE BofA U.S. High Yield OAS (BAMLH0A0HYM2)
- FRED: Chicago Fed National Financial Conditions Index (NFCI)
- Federal Reserve: Financial Stability Report, May 2026
- Swoopr Investment: Fear and Greed Index
- Swoopr Investment: U.S. Stock Market Indexes
Disclaimer
This score is educational market context only. It is not investment advice, a forecast, or a promise of future returns. Historical relationships, scenario results, similarity measures and composite scores do not predict future performance. Data can be delayed, revised, incomplete or subject to third-party licensing restrictions. Swoopr publishes the observation timestamp and methodology version with every live reading.