Market Moods

How to read it

Blob

One group of alike things: energy, metals, farm goods, rates and the dollar, the economy's slow numbers, debt and money, shipping and trade, and the central banks. Tap a blob to go inside and see each member.

Colour

The move, on the same scale as the stock lamp: amber is flat, green rising, red falling, full at 1%. It follows the direction of the number, not whether that is good news: rising unemployment is green here, like rising oil.

Height

Up floats, down sinks. Inside a group the reach is 2.5%, as inside a company view.

Size

A bigger move is a bigger blob. There is no market value to size a price by.

Motion

Restless when the last hour's prints were choppy. Weekly and monthly numbers have no last hour, so they drift slowly.

Move

Prices: percent change on the previous close. Rates: change in basis points (10 bp counts as 1%). Unemployment: change in points (0.1 pt counts as 1%). Jobs: thousands added (150k counts as 1%). Trade balance: change in dollars ($20 bn counts as 1%); the US runs a deficit, so a wider gap is a fall. World government debt: change in points of world GDP (1 pt counts as 1%), an IMF estimate. Prices, sales, spending, debts and freight: percent change on the previous reading.

Dates

Prices are delayed by about 10 minutes while their market is open, and say "closed" with the time of the last print when it is not. Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly numbers carry the period of the reading itself (federal debt: its quarter, which lands about three months after it ends; world debt: the last full year), and are never called live.

A group's move

The plain average of its members' moves. A group with market prices averages only those; the economy blob averages its slow numbers, each at its own date.

Data: Yahoo Finance, FRED and the IMF.