A Sample Week in The Macro Dashboard

A weekly review should be boring

A weekly dashboard review should take a few minutes, not consume the afternoon. Read the allocation, check what changed, understand the cause, and decide whether your own plan needs attention. If nothing meaningful moved, stop there.

Doing nothing sounds easy until the headlines start moving. The dashboard narrows the decision so every data release does not become a portfolio event.

1. Read allocation What are the current weights and percent-of-max exposures?
2. Check changes Did anything move since the prior week?
3. Read the reason Was the change driven by the market regime, VAMS, or confirmation?
4. Read context separately Use GRID, liquidity, and Gavekal to understand the backdrop, not as direct KISS inputs.
5. Apply your rules Decide whether the change matters for your own plan.

Read the allocation first

Start with the current allocation and percent-of-maximum exposure.

This tells you whether the model is spending more or less of its risk budget. If stocks are full, gold is off, bitcoin is off, and cash is high, the model is saying something different than if all three risk sleeves are active.

The earlier post on how to read the portfolio signal covers the mechanics. The weekly habit is simpler: look for changes before looking for stories.

Check the cause, not the story

After the allocation, check what caused the move.

Was there a confirmed VAMS flip? Did the market regime change? Did investable participation improve? Did credit, rates, or the broad-dollar domain stop confirming risk? Those are allocation questions. GRID, the separate liquidity dashboard, and Gavekal can help explain the backdrop, but they do not change KISS allocation directly.

Allocation change Usually worth reviewing.

Regime change Context for risk budget and sleeve behavior.

Pending signal Worth watching, but not the same as confirmed.

One noisy data point Usually not enough by itself.

Decide whether it matters for you

The dashboard can update without requiring a personal trade.

Maybe the change is small. Maybe it is inside a taxable account where trading is expensive. Maybe your implementation rules require a larger threshold. Maybe you use the dashboard as a second opinion rather than a model portfolio.

That is fine. The point of the weekly review is not to create activity. It is to make sure the risk signal is not ignored.

Use the field note as the teaching layer

The weekly field note should explain one piece of the process. Some weeks it may be about dollar liquidity. Other weeks it may be about VAMS, cash, regime confirmation, or portfolio sizing.

That is why the posts are designed to interlink. A subscriber should be able to start with one week’s note and follow the chain into the rest of the framework.

Finish with one decision

A useful review ends with one decision: act, keep watching, or do nothing.

When the dashboard changes but your implementation rules do not call for a trade, closing the tab is part of the process.