The macro dashboard every trader should watch

Single-stock traders love to ignore macro — right up until a Fed meeting or a dollar spike runs over their position. You do not need an economics degree or an institutional terminal to stay ahead of it. A handful of free, official series cover most of what actually drives cross-asset moves.

The short list

• Real yields (10y, 2y). The discount rate for everything. Rising real yields pressure long-duration assets — tech, gold, crypto. How the gap between the 2-year and 10-year yields is read is its own subject: see the 2s10s spread, explained.
• The broad dollar index. A stronger dollar tightens global financial conditions and weighs on commodities and emerging markets.
• The VIX. The market's demand for protection. Spikes mark stress; a low, falling VIX is a risk-on tell.
• Credit spreads. The bond market's honesty check. Widening high-yield spreads mean lenders are demanding more to carry credit risk, which is stress showing up in bonds rather than in stock prices.
• Oil. A read on growth and an input to inflation at the same time.

Where the data comes from

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis's FRED database carries the Treasury yields, the broad dollar index, the VIX and oil prices, updated on official schedules and free to read. Free to read is not the same as free of terms, though. Most of these are public-domain US government series, but the VIX belongs to Cboe and FRED carries it under Cboe's terms, and the widely quoted high-yield spread indices are commercial products that their publishers license separately. Check a series' notes on FRED before you build on it.

How to read them together

No single series is a trade. What helps is reading them together: rising real yields and a stronger dollar and widening credit spreads describe a coherent risk-off backdrop, which says more than any one line does. The mistake is watching them in five different browser tabs and never seeing the pattern.

Meaterm's macro tab puts the Treasury yields, the broad dollar index, the VIX and crude oil on one screen with their history. It reads them from FRED and refreshes every six hours; FRED publishes most daily series after the US close, so nothing here is real-time. It is research context, not a trading signal.

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