What moves markets above and beyond individual companies
Beginner · Macro · no code
Macro 1: The price of money
The number everything else hangs on: why an interest rate exists at all, what 'risk-free' genuinely means, how discounting punishes some companies far more than others, why inflation charges you a tax that appears on no invoice, and why a bond considered safe can lose you two thirds of your money.
Macro 2: Central banks
Who the player behind every headline really is: what its mandate forces it to do, how it moves an overnight rate that nobody actually pays and why the long end escapes it, what it genuinely buys when it does QE and why unwinding is not the same operation in reverse, why the market has already priced the decision before it is announced, and why monetary policy made in Washington ends up being everybody else’s monetary policy.
Macro 3: The yield curve and the business cycle
How to read the chart that sums up what the market believes about the next ten years, why an inverted curve has spent half a century preceding recessions without being an oracle for it, which asset has tended to lead in each phase of the cycle and why that map is only drawn properly in hindsight, and why macro data moves prices through the distance from what was expected rather than through its level.
Macro 4: Inflation, currencies and commodities
Where inflation actually comes from and why its origin decides what happens to your portfolio, how two currencies are tied together by their interest rates and why the carry trade always collapses to the same script, what different information is hidden in the price of oil, copper and gold, and the uncomfortable verdict on which assets really protected the purchasing power that was lost and which merely promised to.
Macro 5: Debt, credit and crises
Why there is no level of government debt beyond which a country goes bust, what a credit spread is really telling you when it widens, how a 2% loss can wipe out an entire fund once leverage is involved, and why the diversification you measured in calm years disappears on exactly the day you were going to need it.
Macro 6: From macro to strategy
The level that turns the previous five into judgment: what a market regime is and why a strategy validated inside just one of them is not validated, why forecasting macro is a business with a dismal track record while knowing your exposure genuinely does add value, which days in the calendar change execution conditions without warning, and where to go next once these ideas stop being judgment and become measurable tools.