Bond WatchtowerChecking official dataOfficial data only

Financial stress and economic direction, explained.

Separate calm market plumbing from expensive borrowing, tightening credit, and the financial conditions shaping year-ahead growth.

Research context only—not a forecast, investment recommendation, or real-time trading feed.

Checking official sourcesSnapshot Not fetched

The server is validating Treasury, New York Fed, OFR, Chicago Fed, Federal Reserve Board, CFTC, and BLS responses. No substitute values are shown while that check runs.

0 official observations

Source health: 7 waiting; Provider connectivity only; this does not imply complete evidence.
Assessment coverage: 0 of 6 measured; Missing or failed evidence remains explicitly unavailable.
Evidence freshness: 0 of 0 current; Every series is judged against its own publication cadence; unavailable or delayed evidence is not presented as current.

Coverage notes and update cadence

Live source issues

Waiting for the first source check.

Known blind spots

GDP, household-demand detail, term-premium decomposition, bank-lending survey detail, and private-market borrower performance remain unmeasured.

Update cadence

Treasury, New York Fed, and OFR update on business days; Chicago Fed and CFTC update weekly; BLS and Fed research models update monthly.

Loaded providers: No official adapter loaded yet

What changed since the previous snapshot

No prior validated browser snapshot is available yet. This comparison will populate after the next successful refresh or visit.

Situation in 30 seconds

Economic overview unavailable.

Financial risk · UnavailableFinancial conditions · UnavailableCoverage · 0/6 configured evidence areas

Official observations have not loaded, so the application will not infer economic conditions.

Coverage refers only to the six configured evidence areas below. It is not complete coverage of GDP, household consumption, private markets, security-level corporate spreads, or every part of the economy.

Unavailable

Current activity

BLS employment data is currently unavailable, so current activity is not inferred from markets.

Evidence coverage: 0%

View evidence checks

Incomplete

Financial risk

Market plumbing is unavailable, public credit is unavailable, and the rate burden is unavailable.

Evidence coverage: 0%

View risk lenses

Insufficient evidence

Financial conditions

Only 0 of 4 configured OFR, Chicago Fed, and Federal Reserve financial-condition checks have enough history.

Evidence coverage: 0%

View financial-condition evidence

Why this assessment? View the six evidence checks

FCI-G unavailable

The Federal Reserve Board financial-conditions impulse on year-ahead GDP growth is unavailable.

Evidence coverage: 0%

Intentional coverage boundary: private markets

Not measured live

Private equity exits and distributions, private-credit nonaccruals and PIK income, BDC redemption requests, and manager-reported valuations require filing-derived or licensed coverage that is not yet active.

Separate the signal from the setting

Market context lenses

Market functioning drives the warning state. Rates and Treasury demand explain the environment without being labeled inherently good or bad.

Green · Lower concernYellow · ReviewRed · Higher concernPurple · High recent range (context, not concern)

Stress and auction rules use concern colors. The rates-regime context uses a separate blue-to-violet range palette because higher rates are not automatically market dysfunction.

Official observations must load before the three lenses can be assessed.

From markets to the economy

Credit and growth transmission

These official weekly and monthly models test whether high rates are spreading into broader financial restraint. They are slower-moving warning indicators, not real-time forecasts.

Broad financial conditions

Chicago Fed NFCI · weekly

Unavailable

n/a

Zero is average. Positive values indicate tighter-than-average financial conditions; negative values indicate looser conditions.

Waiting for enough official observations to draw a trend.

Adjusted for prevailing economic conditions: unavailable

Corporate risk appetite

Fed excess bond premium · monthly

Unavailable

n/a

Positive values signal unusually cautious corporate-bond pricing after controlling for expected default losses.

Waiting for enough official observations to draw a trend.

Model-implied recession probability over 12 months: unavailable

Year-ahead growth impulse

Federal Reserve FCI-G · monthly

Unavailable

n/a

Positive values are modeled headwinds to GDP growth over the next year; negative values are modeled tailwinds.

Waiting for enough official observations to draw a trend.

Why the warning moved

OFR stress drivers

Positive contributions add to the official stress index; negative contributions offset it. These are attribution values, not probabilities.

OFR category and regional contributions are unavailable. The app does not invent an explanation from the aggregate value.

Direction and persistence

Multi-horizon trend context

Choose a window to compare every supported rate. A single noisy day remains sideways unless persistence or statistical confirmation supports the move.

Official observations must load before trends can be classified.

Curve shape, not a trading signal

Treasury curve slopes

Same-date official par yields. Positive, near-flat, and inverted describe curve shape only. Curve inversion is not a deterministic recession forecast or investment recommendation.

2-year to 10-year

10-year par yield minus 2-year par yield

Unavailable

n/a

1-day change: n/a
1-month change: n/a
Trailing-year rank: Not ready
Effective date: Not available

0 same-date observations. Percentile uses up to 252 sessions and requires at least 180 prior observations.

3-month to 10-year

10-year par yield minus 3-month par yield

Unavailable

n/a

1-day change: n/a
1-month change: n/a
Trailing-year rank: Not ready
Effective date: Not available

0 same-date observations. Percentile uses up to 252 sessions and requires at least 180 prior observations.

Official daily closes

U.S. Treasury yield curve

Swipe horizontally to compare nominal, real, and inflation columns.

Maturity	Nominal	Real	Inflation comp.	1D nominal	Source	Freshness
Live Treasury curve data is unavailable.

Market plumbing

Secured funding

Unavailable0% plumbing coverage

New York Fed rate-distribution and relative secured-rate histories are unavailable.

SOFR transaction-rate dispersion

Waiting for enough official observations to draw a trend.

SOFR benchmark: n/a
SOFR middle-50% range: n/a
SOFR volume: n/a
BGCR / TGCR: n/a / n/a

OFR cash repo venues

Centrally cleared overnight: n/a · n/a
Tri-party overnight: n/a · n/a

Absolute SOFR remains a borrower-cost measure. The plumbing state uses transaction-rate dispersion and differences among secured reference rates; OFR venue rates and volumes are supporting context.

Crowding and unwind context

Treasury futures positioning

Unavailable

The weekly CFTC Treasury-futures report is unavailable, so no positioning inference is shown.

Latest CFTC report

Unavailable

Asset managers

Open-interest-weighted net position across four Treasury contracts

Unavailable

Net / open interest

n/a

1Y percentile

n/a

4-week change

n/a

Waiting for enough official observations to draw a trend.

Leveraged funds

Open-interest-weighted net position across four Treasury contracts

Unavailable

Net / open interest

n/a

1Y percentile

n/a

4-week change

n/a

Waiting for enough official observations to draw a trend.

Latest position by contract

Contract	Asset managers	Leveraged funds	One-year ranks	Breadth state	Open interest
Contract2Y	Asset managersn/a	Leveraged fundsn/a	One-year ranksn/a	Breadth stateNot opposing tails	Open interestn/a
Contract5Y	Asset managersn/a	Leveraged fundsn/a	One-year ranksn/a	Breadth stateNot opposing tails	Open interestn/a
Contract10Y	Asset managersn/a	Leveraged fundsn/a	One-year ranksn/a	Breadth stateNot opposing tails	Open interestn/a
ContractBond	Asset managersn/a	Leveraged fundsn/a	One-year ranksn/a	Breadth stateNot opposing tails	Open interestn/a

How to read the sign: positive means more reported long than short futures; negative means more short than long. Treasury futures prices generally move opposite yields.

Breadth: 0 of 4 tenors currently place the two participant groups in materially opposing 90th/10th percentile tails of the preceding 52 reports. The primary curve summary weights each contract by reported open interest; the table preserves each tenor.

What this cannot reveal: cash Treasuries, swaps, options, financing, and cross-market hedges. A large short can be a hedge or one leg of a relative-value trade.

Floating-rate scenario

Debt principalCredit spread over SOFR, bpsSOFR shock, bps

Estimated annual cash interest

Unavailable

Increment from shock

$250,000

The total estimate requires an official SOFR observation. The shock-only increment remains a hypothetical calculation. This is not a financing recommendation.

Treasury supply and demand

Latest 30-year Treasury auction

Issue type unavailable

Bid-to-cover

n/a

High yield

n/a

Offering amount

n/a

Indirect · accepted amount

n/a

Direct · accepted amount

n/a

Primary dealers · accepted amount

n/a

A complete competitive-award denominator is unavailable or inconsistent, so raw accepted amounts are shown instead of percentages. Indirect bidders are an auction-account category and are not synonymous with foreign buyers.

Waiting for enough official observations to draw a trend.

Official 30-year auction results are currently unavailable.

Threshold crossings from official data

Live signal inbox

Official observations are unavailable, so no signals can be calculated.

Methodology, sources, and coverage

Open this section to audit provider health, understand the terminology, and see which official adapters are active or still planned.

Evidence quality / 100

35% freshness + 25% provider health + 25% citation integrity + 15% provider/series breadth. Single-series evidence is capped at 85 before health adjustment; delayed evidence lowers freshness, and stale evidence cannot create a present-tense market alert. This is reliability, not a probability.

Signal strength / 100

28% magnitude + 22% speed + 20% breadth + 12% persistence + 18% evidence quality. Higher means a named rule is more strongly expressed; it is not an expected return, probability, rating, or market forecast.

Context-lens score / 100

Market functioning uses OFR’s absolute zero anchor plus a trailing history. Rates use trailing one-year positions and three-month trends. Auction demand uses comparable 30-year results. These are separate lenses, never a composite economy score.

Source health

New York Fed Markets Data
Waiting for the first SOFR, BGCR, and TGCR reference-rate source checks.
disabled
Last fetch: Not fetchedFailures: 0Delayed/stale series: 0Credentials: not-required
Request policy: waiting for three bounded requests
U.S. Treasury official data
Waiting for the first live nominal-curve, real-curve, and auction source check.
disabled
Last fetch: Not fetchedFailures: 0Delayed/stale series: 0Credentials: not-required
Request policy: waiting for seven bounded requests
Office of Financial Research
Waiting for the first Financial Stress Index and repo-market source checks.
disabled
Last fetch: Not fetchedFailures: 0Delayed/stale series: 0Credentials: not-required
Request policy: waiting for two bounded requests
Chicago Fed financial conditions
Waiting for the first weekly NFCI source check.
disabled
Last fetch: Not fetchedFailures: 0Delayed/stale series: 0Credentials: not-required
Request policy: waiting for the first bounded request
Federal Reserve Board research data
Waiting for the first excess-bond-premium and growth-impulse source checks.
disabled
Last fetch: Not fetchedFailures: 0Delayed/stale series: 0Credentials: not-required
Request policy: waiting for two bounded requests
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Waiting for the first BLS employment and CPI source check.
disabled
Last fetch: Not fetchedFailures: 0Delayed/stale series: 0Credentials: not-required
Request policy: waiting for one bounded keyless monthly request
CFTC Treasury-futures positioning
Waiting for the first weekly Treasury-futures positioning source check.
disabled
Last fetch: Not fetchedFailures: 0Delayed/stale series: 0Credentials: not-required
Request policy: waiting for one bounded public-data request

Plain-English concepts

Market plumbing

The OFR Financial Stress Index provides broad context while New York Fed rate distributions show whether secured transactions are clustering normally. A calm reading does not mean borrowing is cheap or that private-market losses are absent.

Secured-rate dispersion

The SOFR interquartile range measures the width of the middle half of transaction rates. An unusually wide and materially large range can indicate uneven funding conditions; a high SOFR level by itself cannot.

Repo transaction volume

New York Fed and OFR volumes show how much secured funding activity underlies a rate. Unusual volume is supporting context because either higher or lower activity can have more than one explanation.

CFTC Treasury positioning

The weekly Traders in Financial Futures report shows reported futures positions by participant category. Opposing extremes can make an unwind more forceful, but futures alone cannot reveal cash-bond hedges, financing, basis trades, or a trader's intent.

Net position as a share of open interest

This dashboard subtracts reported shorts from longs and divides by total open interest for each contract. The result makes maturities easier to compare, but it is not duration-adjusted and should not be read as total portfolio exposure.

NFCI

The Chicago Fed National Financial Conditions Index combines money, debt, equity, and banking indicators. Positive values are tighter than average; negative values are looser than average.

Excess bond premium

The Federal Reserve's excess bond premium estimates how much corporate bond pricing reflects investor risk appetite beyond expected default losses. Positive readings suggest greater caution.

FCI-G

The Federal Reserve's FCI-G estimates the impulse from financial conditions to GDP growth over the next year. Positive values are modeled headwinds; negative values are modeled tailwinds.

Private-market blind spot

Private equity and private credit report less frequently and with more valuation discretion than public markets. Until filing-derived or licensed coverage is active, the dashboard labels this area unmeasured instead of assuming it is calm.

Long-end yields

The 30-year Treasury yield is sensitive to inflation expectations, fiscal supply, term premium, and demand for long-duration bonds.

Real yield

A real Treasury yield is the inflation-adjusted yield inferred from TIPS. It helps separate changes in real borrowing costs from inflation compensation.

Inflation compensation

Nominal minus real Treasury yields approximate inflation compensation, including inflation and liquidity risk premia. It is not a pure inflation forecast.

SOFR

SOFR is an overnight secured funding rate. It sets many floating-rate borrowing costs, but its absolute level largely reflects the policy-rate environment and is not automatically funding stress.

Bid-to-cover

Bid-to-cover compares auction bids with the amount of Treasury debt sold. A lower reading can indicate weaker demand, but it needs historical context.

Adapter coverage

Official source catalog

New York Fed secured reference rates, U.S. Treasury curves and auctions, OFR stress and repo-market data, Chicago Fed conditions, and Federal Reserve Board research adapters are active. BLS employment and CPI confirmation also loads directly through one keyless official request.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Monthly unemployment, total nonfarm payroll employment, and seasonally adjusted CPI-U directly from BLS.

live-adapter

New York Fed Markets Data

SOFR, BGCR, TGCR, transaction volumes, and reference-rate distribution percentiles.

live-adapter

U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data

Nominal and real Treasury yield curves, derived inflation compensation, auction datasets, and fiscal service data.

live-adapter

Office of Financial Research

Daily Financial Stress Index plus centrally cleared and tri-party overnight repo rates and transaction volumes.

live-adapter

CFTC Commitments of Traders

Weekly futures-only asset-manager and leveraged-fund positioning across 2-year, 5-year, 10-year, and classic Treasury-bond contracts.

live-adapter

Chicago Fed NFCI

Weekly broad and adjusted U.S. financial conditions across money, debt, equity, banking, and shadow-banking channels.

live-adapter

Federal Reserve Board research data

Monthly excess bond premium, model-implied 12-month recession probability, and financial-conditions impulse on year-ahead GDP growth.

live-adapter

New York Fed ACM term premia

Official-hosted research estimates decomposing Treasury yields into expected short rates and term premia.

cataloged

Federal Reserve SLOOS

Quarterly bank-reported lending standards and loan demand for businesses and households.

cataloged

SEC EDGAR APIs

Submissions history, company facts, XBRL concepts, filing metadata, and bulk data.

ready-for-live-adapter

ECB Data Portal

Euro-area rates, yield curves, financial-market data, and SDMX metadata.

cataloged

Bank of England Database

UK policy rates and SONIA statistical-series downloads. Detailed UK yield curves remain spreadsheet-only.

cataloged

Japan rates public sources

JGB yields and public auction or debt data from Japanese official sources.

cataloged

Case study

How Bond Watchtower became a bounded, testable product.

Open case studyStatusWorking research betaMy roleData adapters, risk methodology, provenance model, and dashboard UXCurrent releaseResilient multi-source economic warning map

The problem

Macro dashboards can look authoritative while mixing stale observations, modeled scenarios, and current data without saying which is which. That makes the interface easy to read and hard to trust, especially when a missing source is mistaken for a low-risk signal.

Product response

Bond Watchtower evaluates normalized official-data history with cadence-aware freshness, multi-horizon trend analysis, and deterministic alert rules. New York Fed, U.S. Treasury, OFR, Chicago Fed, Federal Reserve Board, CFTC, and BLS observations power a plain-language financial-risk and scoped financial-conditions overview plus separate futures-crowding context, while household-demand and private-market evidence gaps remain explicit.

Architecture at a glance

Fetch bounded SOFR, nominal/real Treasury, OFR, FiscalData auction, Chicago Fed, Federal Reserve, CFTC, and BLS histories through independent server adapters.
Validate provider payloads, date semantics, auction allocations, provenance, and freshness while retaining source-specific failures.
Classify 1-week, 1-month, 3-month, and 1-year direction using material moves, persistence, signal-to-noise, and linear-fit confirmation.
Keep employment, inflation, market plumbing, expensive rates, public-credit transmission, the modeled growth impulse, and private-market visibility separate so no calm signal can manufacture an all-clear.
Evaluate evidence-aware alert rules without allowing stale or missing data to create present-tense stress claims.
Render one plain-language Situation in 30 Seconds conclusion, keep six technical evidence pillars in an optional disclosure, and retain secured-funding, futures-positioning, public-credit, growth-transmission, nominal/real/inflation-rate, Treasury-demand, source-ledger, alert-inbox, and rate-sensitivity tools.

Proof, not claims

Each observation retains its provider, effective date, fetch time, cadence, and official citation.
Adapters have timeouts, response-size limits, provider validation, and isolated failure behavior.
Unit tests cover rising, falling, sideways, and insufficient trend histories; economic-direction sign conventions; and explicit private-market unknown states.
Component, API, and browser tests cover indicators, official source modes, horizon selection, filtering, scenario math, and desktop/mobile rendering.

Honest boundaries

This is research software, not investment advice, a broker connection, or an intraday trading terminal.
GDP, household-demand, unsupported global, security-level spread, and private-market coverage remains absent until a validated adapter is available.
No scheduled polling, alert delivery, trade execution, or portfolio instruction happens automatically.

Next release

Add GDP and household-demand confirmation only after a stable official schema and vintage policy are defined.
Persist revision-aware daily snapshots and add vintage-aware backtesting beyond the bounded histories supplied by the official feeds.
Add defined SEC filing metrics for selected BDC issuers and filing-period comparisons.
Evaluate licensed spread or evaluated-price data before making any intraday credit claim.

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