Direct Answer
A cross-asset risk appetite dashboard compares equities, credit, volatility, rates and the dollar, positioning, and leverage to show whether they describe the same market state. This one keeps every family's state, confidence and raw values visible, lists divergences without resolving them, and reports how much of the methodology weight is actually available. It opens on illustrative sample data, and live feeds are not connected.
Cross-Asset Risk Appetite Dashboard: Where Markets Agree and Where They Do Not
Key Takeaways
- Six evidence families carry fixed, published weights (20, 20, 20, 15, 15 and 10 percent). A family can contribute at most its own weight, so three volatility inputs never count as three families.
- Each family shows a descriptive state first, then confidence, raw values, percentile, freshness and source. The composite number is secondary.
- Disagreement between families is listed as a contradiction and is never averaged away.
- Completeness (how much weight is available) and confidence (how reliable the available readings are) are separate figures and are never rescaled to look complete.
- Rates and the dollar are contextual. They are reported as mixed or contextual and carry no direction.
- The page runs on a bundled illustrative sample with fictional dates. It describes evidence and state. It is not a forecast and not a recommendation.
What Is a Cross-Asset Risk Appetite Dashboard?
Risk appetite is how willing investors are to hold assets that can lose value. No single market measures it. Equity prices, credit spreads, implied volatility, Treasury yields, the dollar, futures positioning and margin borrowing each capture a different part, and they often move out of step. A dashboard earns its place by showing where they agree and where they do not.
The method here follows the published methodology (version 1.0.0). Each component is placed against its own history as a percentile within a chosen window, oriented so that a higher family score means stronger risk appetite, and averaged inside its family by the component weights. Raw source values are never changed: the orientation applies to the derived score only. For the framework behind this, read Cross-Asset Risk Appetite.
Cross-Asset Risk Appetite Dashboard
Illustrative sample data. The values and dates below are fictional (as of 2031-03-14) and are not current market data. Live feeds are not connected. Overwrite any value, untick a component to leave it out, or paste your own history. Current readings come from the primary sources in the References section.
Market-state summary
Completeness, confidence and composite
Evidence families
Divergences
State history
Each earlier row uses only readings that were public on that date. A component that cannot be rebuilt from history (for example the term-structure state) is left out of earlier rows.
Source and freshness details for every component
| Component | Status | Observed | Published | Retrieved | Freshness | Methodology | Source |
|---|
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to Swoopr Investment's servers.
How Each State, Score and Confidence Is Defined
The families, components, weights and directions below are the published methodology, version 1.0.0, shared with the Sentiment Composite Explorer. A change to any of them is a new version, not an edit.
| Family | Component | Weight in family | Direction | Normalization | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Equity participation 20% of the total | Broad index trend | 40% | Higher reads as stronger risk appetite | percentile | daily |
| Equal-weight versus cap-weight performance | 30% | Higher reads as stronger risk appetite | percentile | daily | |
| Share of stocks above their 200-day average | 30% | Higher reads as stronger risk appetite | percentile | daily | |
| Credit 20% of the total | U.S. high-yield option-adjusted spread | 60% | Higher reads as weaker risk appetite | percentile | daily |
| U.S. investment-grade option-adjusted spread | 40% | Higher reads as weaker risk appetite | percentile | daily | |
| Volatility 20% of the total | VIX level | 40% | Higher reads as weaker risk appetite | percentile | daily |
| VIX term-structure state | 30% | Higher reads as stronger risk appetite | state map | daily | |
| Volatility risk premium | 30% | Higher reads as stronger risk appetite | percentile | daily | |
| Rates and dollar context 15% of the total | Ten-year Treasury yield change | 50% | Contextual, no direction | z score | daily |
| Broad dollar index change | 50% | Contextual, no direction | z score | daily | |
| Positioning 15% of the total | Leveraged Funds net position, share of open interest | 50% | Higher reads as stronger risk appetite | percentile | weekly |
| Asset Manager net position, share of open interest | 50% | Higher reads as stronger risk appetite | percentile | weekly | |
| Leverage 10% of the total | Margin debit balances, 12-month change | 50% | Higher reads as weaker risk appetite | percentile | monthly |
| Margin debit balances relative to equity market value | 50% | Higher reads as weaker risk appetite | ratio percentile | monthly |
- Normalize. A component's value is ranked against its own history in the chosen window, using only observations public by the as-of date. Fewer observations than the cadence minimum (252 daily, 52 weekly, 36 monthly) leaves the raw value alone with no percentile.
- Orient. A percentile from 0 to 100 becomes a score from -1 to +1. For series where a higher reading means more stress, such as credit spreads and the VIX, the sign is flipped so a higher score always means stronger risk appetite. The raw value is untouched.
- State. A component or family score of +0.25 or more reads improving, -0.25 or less reads deteriorating, and anything between reads neutral. A family whose components point both ways reads mixed.
- Cap. A family's contribution is its score times its weight, so it can never exceed that weight whatever number of correlated inputs it holds.
- Confidence. Each component scores 35% on source tier, 35% on freshness and 30% on history length. A family averages its components by their weights, then scales by the share of components present and by agreement inside the family. Overall confidence is scaled again by completeness.
- Completeness. The weight of families with a usable reading, out of 100%. A missing family is excluded from the composite and named in the summary. Nothing is rescaled to look complete.
The composite is the sum of family contributions over families that have a direction, and its state uses a narrower band (+0.15 and -0.15) because averaging compresses scores. Rates and dollar context carry no direction and are left out of it.
Contradiction Rules
These rules are fixed and deterministic. When one fires, the dashboard lists it with a severity and the families involved. It does not decide which reading is right.
| Rule | Fires when |
|---|---|
| Equity and credit divergence | Equity participation reads improving while credit reads deteriorating, or the reverse. |
| Equity price and breadth divergence | The broad index trend is improving while the breadth components are deteriorating. |
| Volatility and credit divergence | Volatility readings are easing while credit deteriorates, or the reverse. |
| Composite and leverage fragility | The directional composite is improving while leverage fragility is elevated. |
| Current price families, stale slow families | At least one price-based family is current while positioning or leverage data are stale against their own release cadence. |
Severity comes from the gap between the two scores: a gap of 1.0 or more is high, 0.6 or more is moderate, and anything smaller is low.
Worked Reading of the Illustrative Sample
On the fictional as-of date of 2031-03-14, the bundled sample reads as follows. Every figure is invented for demonstration.
- Credit is deteriorating. The high-yield spread (5.66 percentage points) sits at the 72th percentile of its window, which for a stress series orients to a score of -0.4375.
- Equity participation is improving (family score 0.3703), so the equity and credit divergence rule fires. The page lists it and does not pick a side.
- Positioning is stale. The Commitments of Traders reading was published on 2031-02-14, several weekly releases ago, so it is labelled stale while the price-based families stay current.
- Leverage fragility is elevated (family score -0.661), which describes how far losses could be amplified and says nothing about direction.
- Rates and the dollar are mixed or contextual. Their percentiles are shown and no direction is assigned.
Complete weight is available (100%), and the composite (0.0604) is neutral. That near-neutral composite hides the disagreement the family cards and the divergence list make visible, which is the reason the composite is secondary.
What This Tool Does Not Do
- It does not fetch live data. Values come from you or from the labelled sample.
- It does not forecast. A state describes the evidence at the dates shown and carries no promise about what follows.
- It cannot rebuild every component historically. The state history uses components that have a history. A state-map component such as the term-structure state is left out of earlier rows.
- Percentiles are relative to a window. A different window or a short history can move a reading, which is why the window is explicit and the raw value is always shown.
- It is educational and is not personalized advice. Nothing here is a recommendation about any security or position.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a cross-asset risk appetite dashboard show?
It shows whether several markets are describing the same state at the same time. This dashboard groups fourteen components into six evidence families (equity participation, credit, volatility, rates and dollar context, positioning, and leverage), states each family as improving, neutral, deteriorating, mixed or unavailable, and keeps the raw values, percentiles, freshness and source beside every state. It describes evidence. It does not forecast and does not recommend any action.
Why is there no single risk-on or risk-off score?
A single score hides disagreement, and disagreement is the useful part. Credit can be widening while equity indexes rise, or volatility can ease while leverage builds. The composite on this page is a secondary summary that never replaces the family states, and the contradictions between families are listed rather than averaged away.
What is the difference between completeness and confidence?
Completeness is the share of the methodology weight that has a usable reading, so leaving out a family lowers it and nothing is rescaled to hide the gap. Confidence is a separate, methodology-defined measure built from source tier, freshness, history length and agreement within a family. Overall confidence is also scaled by completeness, so a dashboard that is 70% complete cannot show the confidence of a complete one.
Why are rates and the dollar shown as mixed or contextual?
A rising Treasury yield or a stronger dollar can accompany stronger growth in one period and tighter financial conditions in another, so neither has a universal sign. The dashboard reports their percentiles and z-scores as context and labels the family mixed or contextual. It leaves them out of the directional composite instead of forcing a direction.
What happens when positioning or leverage data are stale?
The older reading stays visible with a stale label, judged against its own release cadence (weekly for Commitments of Traders, monthly for margin statistics). It does not downgrade price-based families that are current, and a contradiction rule records the mismatch so the age of the evidence is never hidden.
Is the data on this page live?
No. Live feeds are not connected. The page opens on a bundled illustrative sample with fictional values and dates (as of 2031-03-14) so every feature can be tried. You can overwrite any value, leave a component out, or paste your own history. For real readings, use the primary sources linked in the References section.
References
Primary sources for the components this dashboard describes. The sample values on this page are fictional and are not drawn from any of them.
- CFTC: Commitments of Traders: the weekly positioning reports behind the positioning family.
- CFTC: Commitments of Traders Explanatory Notes: trader categories and report definitions.
- FINRA: Margin Regulation and Statistics: margin debit balances behind the leverage family.
- FRED: ICE BofA US High Yield Index Option-Adjusted Spread: the high-yield spread series used for credit.
- Cboe: VIX Index: the volatility index and its term-structure products.
- Federal Reserve: Financial Stability Report: the Federal Reserve's assessment of leverage and funding vulnerabilities.
Jurisdiction: United States data sources. Last reviewed by the Swoopr Editorial Team in October 2026. This page is educational and is not personalized investment advice.
Related Reading
- Cross-Asset Risk Appetite: the framework this dashboard implements.
- Positioning vs Sentiment vs Breadth: the equity participation family.
- Credit Spreads and Risk Appetite: the credit family.
- VIX Term Structure: the volatility family.
- Macro Economics and Market Regimes: why rates and the dollar are contextual.
- Commitments of Traders: the positioning family.
- Margin Debt and Leverage: the leverage family.
- Source Ladder: how source tiers are ranked.
- Data Latency and Vintages: publication delay and point-in-time data.
- Market Sentiment Analysis: the full guide cluster.