Macro Tide · No. 8Proprietary

The megacaps were sold on what they intend to spend, not on what they earned

The regime read — bottom line first

The week that was

What changed this week

• Allocation shifts (>3pt, a sleeve entering or leaving, or the US vehicle split): Long bonds -1.1pt (leaves the book).

Sleeve moves — from % to %, and why

Target weights of the Macro Tide Core, last note → this note, every sleeve. A move is either the rules (a methodology change, dated in the changelog) or the regime (conviction, quadrant, a gate) — the why says which. Tilt figures are computed from this edition's z and this product's own tilt strength. The withdrawal dial (below the allocation table) sits on top of these and never changes them.

Bold = moved ≥ 0.5pp. History accrues in targets_log.csv by edition.

Where we are — the 2×2

The liquidity tide

The six-cycle read

Each row is the CURRENT-WEEK standing — every cycle is recomputed on the latest data (not the frozen month-end): z-scores vs each series' ~10-yr norm for the composites (+ = above average), 13-week momentum for Liquidity, and the spread level for Credit. Last wk is the reading in the previous note and Δ wk the move since; what changed underneath is in the sections below.

Native readings (under the hood): Growth = 7/11 indicators above trend · Inflation = 5/8 up (broad underlying ~2.8%) · Liquidity = net $5.8T · Monetary = 2y 4.69%, real 2.64% · Positioning = VIX 19 · Dollar = +0.0% y/y (broad TWI).

How to read the scores. The z column counts standard deviations from that cycle's own ten-year average, so it says how UNUSUAL a reading is rather than what it is. Zero is normal, half a point is mildly above average, one point is unusual and two is rare. Leading indicators carry the most weight in the average. Growth, Inflation, Monetary and Positioning all lean on monthly data, so the tape flag beside Growth and Inflation is the fresher read: it comes from five days of market moves across asset classes and can run a month or two ahead of the slower score it either confirms or contradicts. Two rows work differently — Liquidity is thirteen-week momentum, not a z-score, and Credit is simply the spread level.

Treasury liq (Bessent's bridge): the Treasury injects liquidity via long-bond buybacks + bill-heavy issuance — swapping duration for near-cash, which eases financial conditions like stealth QE without the Fed cutting. +0.80 = injecting; a displayed read, not wired into conviction.

Dollar (how it's measured): the Fed's broad trade-weighted USD (DTWEXBGS, 26 currencies incl. China/Mexico/EM), +0.0% YoY and below its 12-mo trend. The narrower, euro-heavy DXY can read firmer — the softness is concentrated against trade/EM partners, which is exactly the debasement tilt (gold + EM).

Liquidity — current weekly read (Fed H.4.1), now wired into conviction: net Fed liquidity $5.80T, 13-week momentum -1.6% as of 2026-10-21 — vs the trailing monthly composite's -1.6%. The drain is steady (TGA rebuild into a drained RRP now pulls on bank reserves directly). Every cycle is now recomputed weekly on the latest data; the monthly composite remains the historical backbone the states are smoothed against.

Global liquidity (Howell). We add up the big central banks' balance sheets in dollars — Fed $6.8T, ECB $6.7T, BoJ $4.0T, $17.4T in all — and track whether that total is growing or shrinking over thirteen weeks. It is running at -1.3% (as of 2026-10-16; the global figures lag about a week), against -1.6% for the Fed on its own, because the ECB and BoJ are shrinking too. This feeds conviction alongside the Fed read, and the two agree this week. On our data it leads the S&P's next-quarter return by about thirteen weeks (roughly 0.6 correlation), so a shrinking tide is a headwind ahead rather than today — which is Howell's “liquidity peaked around the end of 2025” call. Note this is the slow, leading read: the fast-cut's funding test watches US money-market plumbing directly instead (SOFR against IORB). China's central bank, which Howell ties to gold, would be a fourth leg; there is no clean free data series for it yet.

Cross-asset tape

The market's leading edge vs the monthly composite — 5-day moves as of 2026-10-23.

Nowcast — Inflation cooling ↓, Growth firm ↑. The six-cycle inflation reading is recomputed weekly (now +0.19) and its momentum state still reads cooling; the cross-asset tape (5-day) agrees (oil, 10Y). This tape read is the leading edge, shown not wired into the sleeves: if it persists, the momentum state flips and conviction gets cut (inflation enters as −i_state at a 0.25 weight). Growth internals are noisier — one soft breadth print isn't a turn while the hard data (payrolls) is firm.

Color = direction of the 5-day move, not good/bad. Free data (Yahoo): UST yields, DXY & major FX, commodity ETFs, diesel (ULSD future — the real-economy barometer of the oil shock; diesel outpacing crude = the cost is running ahead of the headline), HY/IG credit, equal- vs cap-weight breadth, listed BDCs vs HY (the private-credit tell: BDCs lagging high-yield = the market pricing private-credit stress ahead of the quarterly marks).

Factor lens — 1D · WTD · QTD · YTD

Style factors vs the S&P 500, excess return in percentage points, as of 2026-10-23 (WTD from the 2026-10-16 close, QTD from 2026-09-30, YTD from 2025-12-31). z = this week's 5-day excess vs its own 1-year distribution. Shown, not wired into the sleeves.

S&P 500 itself: 1D -0.52% · WTD -0.43% · QTD -0.35% · YTD +11.45%.

Sleeve scoreboard — the nine sleeves vs the S&P

Absolute return and excess vs SPY over the same horizons — the model's own building blocks, watched the way the factors are.

Styles. Year-to-date value leads (+10.9pp vs the S&P) and growth lags (-10.4pp); quarter-to-date low-vol leads (+6.0pp) and momentum lags (-8.4pp); this week small-cap value (+2.5pp) over growth (-1.1pp). The leader changes with the horizon — rotation inside the market rather than one persistent bet.

Value vs growth. Value is 21.3pp ahead of growth year-to-date — the reflation/late-cycle signature (higher yields, oil, a weaker dollar) that the inflation-tilted regime read implies; it is also why the equal-weight index has stopped underperforming.

Risk appetite. Low-vol -2.1pp YTD — a market paying for beta, not safety (risk-ON), which matches the positioning cycle's 'neutral, not fearful' read. Small caps +3.6pp YTD — breadth is real, the rally is not just the top ten.

Momentum. +4.2pp YTD but -8.4pp QTD: the July crowding reversal, the multi-strategy deleveraging Burry described, returned the excess. The US-equity sleeve holds momentum on a band — the gate turns on above conviction +0.20, off below −0.20, and holds its state in between — which is the condition designed for this case.

Sleeves, year-to-date. gold -7.5% (-18.9pp vs SPY); commodities +53.5% (+42.1pp vs SPY); EM +13.3% (+1.9pp vs SPY); intl developed +10.5% (-0.9pp vs SPY); mega-cap growth +6.2% (-5.2pp vs SPY); managed futures +16.6% (+5.2pp vs SPY); long bonds -6.7% (-18.1pp vs SPY); bitcoin -7.4% (-18.9pp vs SPY).

What it tells the model. Commodities are well ahead of the S&P while long bonds lag — the pattern an inflation tape makes. The real-asset sleeve is positioned for it, and long bonds are out of the book — the same side the tape is on. Bitcoin is far behind gold. Both are meant to gain when money is being debased, but bitcoin also needs plentiful liquidity, and it is not confirming the move. The tilt keeps the position small.

5-day risk pairs: High-beta vs low-vol -3.63pp · Cyclicals vs defensives -0.16pp · Small vs large +2.39pp. Read: Small-cap is the leading style (+2.39pp vs the S&P); value ahead of growth by 2.03pp; factors lean risk-OFF; with a defensive bid (low-vol + quality bid up).

The Gundlach dashboard

Four of Jeffrey Gundlach's standing metrics, reproduced from free data (Sep-8-2026 webcast, "The Fed's Next Move"). Shown as context for the Monetary cycle and the duration gate — none is wired into conviction.

How we use it: the 10-year model and the 2-year spread inform the Monetary cycle's narrative and the duration gate (gate opens only when the monetary read turns); CAPE is valuation context — our own point-in-time test found valuation does not time entries, so it stays out of conviction; copper/gold is a tape cross-check.

The week in numbers

Last note vs this note for the gauge; the tape by day from the daily monitor's snapshots. What moved, in one table.

What we learned this week

The inputs that came in, and what the model did with each — adopted, tested and kept, tested and rejected, or recorded as commentary. Details in the model changelog.

• The momentum gate now has memory, and that is a change of rule rather than of view (model). It holds its state inside ±0.20 in conviction: on above +0.20, off below −0.20, unchanged in between. The old rule was the sign of conviction, which flipped the leg 28 times in 19.7 years and twice in three editions this month on moves of a few thousandths — a sixth of the book each time, for a reading that has spent seven weeks inside ±0.05. Hysteresis cuts that to ten flips on the same history. It also leaves momentum on more of the time, 87 months against 75, which is worth saying because the change is easily misread as holding less momentum. It is not. It is making fewer round trips.

• The gate was on when the rule changed and it stayed on, so the change traded nothing. Its state is carried in the register from this edition and was seeded from the position the book actually held. The alternative was to derive it from the rebuilt monthly history, which would have sold a sixth of the book on a conviction of −0.372 for 31 August — a number no edition ever published. That gap is not data drift: it is the model as it stands today reading a day it never saw. Edition 1 held US equity at 25.7% and cash at 30.5% against today's 46.1% and nil.

• The momentum leg is now a different fund. SPMO replaces MTUM. Of six candidates tested it was the one to pass every scored bar — ahead by 0.016 and 0.011 in the two era-halves that contain it, with drawdown and turnover unchanged — so on the evidence the bars measure it is a straightforward improvement, and the leg's job is unchanged. Its exposure to the semiconductor complex is much the same, 0.35 against 0.36, so the question of how much of this book rides on one theme is neither helped nor worsened by the switch; it remains open, and separate from the choice of vehicle.

• A figure this page published was a futures contract described as the oil price (model). While the Federal Reserve's data service was in maintenance, the oil series carried a stand-in for the prompt WTI contract. The pages of 16, 19 and 21 October quoted $101.41 and $101.79. The authoritative spot series — checked against the Energy Information Administration's own workbook, which matches it to the cent on every day of the window — reads $108.21 and $107.89 for those dates. The stand-in now writes to its own file and the gauge reads the authoritative series only.

• The code honoured that ruling and the data did not, because the repair was made by hand (process). Restoring the oil series on 23 October meant writing the authoritative spot history back into the file, and that hand-repair carried one stand-in row along with it: 22 October at $99.47, a December futures settle, sitting in the series reserved for Cushing spot. The ingestion code was not at fault and would not have written it — the routing it gained this week sends every vendor row to a separate file, and it did. The row was found by the pre-publication data audit, which grades every series against its own source and flagged a file whose last observation was newer than the source's. Removing it moved the inflation leg from +0.15 to +0.19 and left the regime, the conviction score and every allocation unchanged. Two figures in this note's own draft were wrong because of it, and one of them was the sentence above claiming the gauge reads the authoritative series only. A fix verified in code is not verified in the data it was written to protect; the audit, not the diff, is what closes one of these. The protection the ruling asked for exists and works. What it does not cover is a human editing the file directly, which is now the only route by which this can happen again.

• Max drawdown was being measured on the marks rather than on the path (model). The figure came from the days the model happened to run — eight of them, with gaps of one to eighteen days. Measured on daily closes, Core is −2.51% against the −2.42% published and the S&P is −2.47% against −1.97%. As published, the table showed the book drawing down 45 basis points more than the index; on the daily path the two are four apart. The benchmark's worst day, 16 September, simply was not a mark. Edition 7's table has been restated and carries a dated correction.

• The data service served a maintenance page and the pipeline filed it as data (model). On 21 October it returned an HTML page under a success code. The parser kept any line whose second comma-separated field was a number, so a stylesheet link became a row in all 45 series files and was reported as a successful observation. Nothing could render. A response that is not CSV is now rejected whole and the file holds at its last good value, which is the honest behaviour and visible in the run.

• The curve's whole move was real yields for a second week. The ten-year fell nine basis points while breakevens fell one. Whatever is bidding for duration is not revising its view of inflation, and the Michigan survey on Friday revised long-run expectations the other way.

• An outside view disagreed with our monetary reading, and the disagreement is worth more than the agreement. Apollo's Torsten Slok, citing the Richmond Fed's Q3 CFO survey, reports 81% of firms saying financing costs and credit access do not constrain their investment plans, and concludes that policy is not restrictive. This gauge's monetary cycle reads −0.85, which is to say tight. The composite measures the price of money against its own history; the survey measures whether borrowers can get it. Both can hold, and the distinction matters: the second is the one that usually breaks things, and it is not what our score is telling you.

Inflation cross-check · COVID-robustour standard read (+0.19) measures inflation against a decade whose average was inflated by the 2021–23 spike. On a COVID-robust basis (median/MAD) it reads +0.56, and broad underlying inflation still sits +0.77pp above the 2% target — the disinflation is off the peak, not below normal.

What moved under the hood

Which of the 19 sub-indicators shifted this week — only the movers (|Δz| ≥ 0.25).

Net: Growth -0.03 → +0.52 · Inflation +0.03 → +0.19 · nothing flipped a cycle.

The week ahead

Scheduled releases that could move the gauge — consensus where available.

Real-world check

Prediction markets this week

Monetary · Financial conditions · Dollar — where the crowd is pricing the macro.

Target allocation

Three products, one engine. Macro Tide Core — the engine, long-only, for retirement accounts · no withdrawals · drawdown budget 12%. Macro Tide Spring — the engine plus a 15/15 market-neutral pair, in a taxable margin account · gross 130%, net 100%; its sleeve weights are the Macro Tide Core's, the pair sits on top. Macro Tide Harbor — the engine with two years of spending held in T-bills, for clients drawing income · hard 10% cash floor at 5%/yr; 4% / 6% are dials: floor = max(10%, 2 × rate); today the floor binds (the Macro Tide Core holds 0% cash, this book holds 10%). All three: risk cap 1.00, ladder 1.00 / 0.90 / 0.80 / 0.25 / 0.10 on conviction, fast-cut to 35% risk, momentum tilt k .50, Gundlach duration gate, the momentum leg (SPMO) gated on ±0.20 hysteresis in conviction. Adopted 2026-09-13 on fifteen pre-registered bars (changelog §27); the books run from the 8/31 close on these rules (§28).

US-equity legs: SPY 33 / SPMO 33 / MAGS 33 (momentum ON — conviction +0.04; the gate turns on above +0.20, off below −0.20, and holds in between) The US-equity sleeve is a deliberate, sized bet on the AI capex cycle (MAGS, and momentum while the gate holds) — an exposure the conviction gate and the fast-cut exist to contain, not a claim that the cycle's returns on capital will hold.

Macro Tide Summit — in preparation

Core's book in a retirement account, with the equity sleeves at 1.4× through listed calls on the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100. Every sleeve is Core's; what differs is below. Summit is not yet offered: these are its targets for the 2026-10-23 close, on the record before its ledger exists.

Calls read from the chain at the 2026-10-23 close, mid prices; contracts per $1 million at that close's spot.

Relative-momentum tilt (allocator 1.16): each non-US risk sleeve × (1 + 0.50·z), z = its 12-month return vs SPY against its own 120-month history, clipped ±2; the risk sleeves are rescaled so the risk budget and cash are unchanged. Read at the 2026-10-31 close: Int'l z +1.0 → ×1.51 · EM z +0.6 → ×1.30 · Commodities z +2.0 → ×1.98 · Gold z -0.7 → ×0.67 · BTC z -0.7 → ×0.67 · Mgd fut z +0.6 → ×1.31 · Long bonds z -0.2 → ×0.90.

Duration gate (Gundlach, allocator 1.18): 10-yr 5.00% vs fair value 4.75% ((Bund + 7-yr nominal GDP growth) ÷ 2; Bund 3.36 (2026-10-23), GDP to 2026-04) → gap +0.25pp → TLT at 0% of its regime weight (scales in from +0.25pp, full at +0.75pp). Own duration only when the bond is cheap to his model; at a fair-value gap long bonds beat cash 40% of the time, above +0.25pp 78%.

Commodity gate (allocator 1.20, changelog §33): the commodity sleeve moves to cash when global liquidity momentum or the monetary read sits one standard deviation below its own 60-month norm. This week: liquidity z +0.13, monetary z -0.32 → gate OFF. Adopted on ten pre-registered bars; its work is in tightening cycles (gated months lost 2.8%/mo in 2007–16).

The $100,000 Macro Tide Core ledger

the engine, long-only, for retirement accounts · no withdrawals · drawdown budget 12%. A share-by-share ledger started at the 8/31/2026 closes. It trades only when a sleeve drifts more than 3 points off target, or once a month, and every trade is dated in the rebalance log. A hypothetical track record, not advice.

The $100,000 Macro Tide Spring ledger

the engine plus a 15/15 market-neutral pair, in a taxable margin account · gross 130%, net 100%. A share-by-share ledger started at the 8/31/2026 closes. It trades only when a sleeve drifts more than 3 points off target, or once a month, and every trade is dated in the rebalance log. A hypothetical track record, not advice.

The $100,000 Macro Tide Harbor ledger

the engine with two years of spending held in T-bills, for clients drawing income · hard 10% cash floor at 5%/yr; 4% / 6% are dials: floor = max(10%, 2 × rate). A share-by-share ledger started at the 8/31/2026 closes. It trades only when a sleeve drifts more than 3 points off target, or once a month, and every trade is dated in the rebalance log. A hypothetical track record, not advice.

The books vs SPY

Inception 8/31/2026 · week 8 · $100,000 each · products reconstructed to the 8/31 close on the rules adopted 9/13 · marked to the 10/23/2026 close.

Macro Tide Core, Macro Tide Spring and Macro Tide Harbor are $100,000 share ledgers run from the 8/31 close on the rules adopted 9/13 — their history to that date is a reconstruction from the reads published each week, at Schwab closes, with the same drift rule (changelog §28). SPY is a 100% S&P-500 benchmark on the standard weekly basis — the 8/28 close (769.35), a fixed historical close, → latest close. That basis is what makes the benchmark's weekly move below the same figure Google and Schwab quote for the S&P. Max drawdown is the realised peak-to-trough of every daily close since inception, not of the weekly marks: the marks are the days the model happened to run, and a trough between two of them is invisible to them (perf 1.13.0, after edition 7's figure was restated). It is measured to the latest close, so a book still falling shows its drawdown running rather than recovered. It is the live path to date and not the 2007–26 backtested figure; those are in Four ways to hold the same risk. Sharpe and beta are withheld until 52 weekly marks (week 6 of 52): annualised from fewer, they would be a confident number about nothing. Hypothetical, not advice. The Balanced book was closed at the 9/11/2026 mark at $100,155 (+0.16% since inception) when the profile was retired (changelog §12).

Four ways to hold the same risk — 2007–26

The same sleeves, four ways: buy SPY and hold; the static four-sleeve basket from Part 2 (SPY, QQQ, gold, managed futures, fixed weights); inverse-volatility over those four (quarterly, trailing 12-month vol); and the nine-sleeve regime model as run today (six-cycle conviction, fast-cut, momentum tilt, net of 0bp one-way). Sharpe is excess over T-bills. Closed months only, Feb 2007 to Sep 2026: the month in progress is left out, as in the start-date study. The eras are a regime split, not out-of-sample validation — every rule was chosen knowing the full history.

Backtest 2026-10-25: neutral risk step 0.55, momentum tilt mom. Inverse-vol is the honest passive alternative: it keeps most of the static basket's return with less drawdown, and the regime model's edge over it is the drawdown, not the return.

Spending from the books — the Macro Tide Harbor and the others under withdrawals

The Macro Tide Harbor is built for a 5%/yr withdrawal: the same engine with a hard 10% cash floor (2 years of spending) that tops the cash sleeve up, never adds to it. The glide never spends the cushion: when the model returns idle cash to the risk sleeves after a bottoming signal, it deploys only what sits above the floor, so the 2 years of spending are intact in every month of both test samples. The other lines are shown under the same withdrawals with no floor of their own. Below: withdraw the dial's rate of starting capital every year (monthly, not inflation-indexed) from 2007 to today, and over every rolling 10-year window. Start 100. The Conservative and Balanced profiles were retired (changelog §12).

Nominal withdrawals of starting capital; indexing them to inflation makes every line harder, the 6% dial most. The floor costs a little return in high-conviction months (it binds only when the model wants less than 2 years of spending in cash) and buys liquidity, not drawdown protection: the client never sells the engine to fund a withdrawal. Backtest 2026-10-25.

Commentary

Not investment advice. Hypothetical framework output computed on public data (FRED + Yahoo Finance); past performance does not predict future results. This is a research and education note, not a recommendation.

© 2026 Nemdhari LLC. All rights reserved. The Macro Tide framework — its six-cycle regime gauge, conviction score, allocation rules, indicators, code and model portfolios — is the proprietary intellectual property of Nemdhari LLC. Research and education only; not investment advice, not an offer or solicitation, and not a recommendation for any person. Hypothetical and model results do not reflect actual client accounts; past performance does not predict future results.

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