The Framework
How I separate investment signals from the market's noise in global macro.
Markets throw off an enormous amount of information every day: economic data, earnings, policy decisions, positioning, capital flows, geopolitics, price action, and thousands of other signals, all competing for attention. The hard part was never getting access to more information. The hard part is knowing what matters.
That distinction is the entire reason The Macro Signal exists. My job, as I see it, is to sit between the market’s noise and its meaning and filter one from the other. I was trained as an electrical engineer before I was ever trained as an investor, and separating signal from noise is quite literally the first thing they teach you. Everything I build is designed to do that same job on markets.
The framework has two halves that work from opposite directions:
G.L.R. is the top-down view: the macro forces that drive markets.
The Four Pillars is the bottom-up view: what is actually happening inside and across individual markets.
They are connected on purpose. Macro conditions shape individual markets, and market behavior is itself real-time information about the macro environment. One feeds the other. The point of the whole exercise is to move, in order, from data to signal to context to implication.
Markets move on change, not levels
If you turn on CNBC right now, you will hear any one of eighty reasons from the pundits as to why the market was up or down today. It has been my observation over two decades that it is really much simpler than that. Markets are driven, most of the time, by surprises in one of three things:
Growth. Liquidity. Risk appetite.
That’s it.
The level of each matters, of course. However, markets are forward-looking, and what usually matters more is the direction of travel, the rate of change, and the gap between what is happening and what was already expected.
Strong growth can sit alongside falling markets, if growth is decelerating faster than investors expected. Weak conditions can sit alongside rising prices, if liquidity is improving and expectations had already turned sufficiently sour. The useful question, then, is rarely “is the economy good or bad?” The useful questions are: What is changing? What is the market already pricing? Where are expectations wrong? And what happens if the regime changes?
This is why the framework lives at the turning points. And it is where my one non-negotiable belief comes in: not all data is created equal. Some data is lagging, some coincident, some leading, and a rare slice is genuinely anticipatory. Most of the industry, and most of the FOMC, builds decisions on the first two. For a real-time investment decision, those are close to the worst data you can use. The edge is in seeing the inflection before it shows up in the headline number.
G.L.R.: the top-down macro framework
G.L.R. is the organizing structure for the macro environment.
G: Growth
Is economic activity strengthening or weakening, and where are the turning points?
Growth is broader than GDP or a single PMI print. I look at the breadth, composition, momentum, expectations, and fragility of activity:
How widely is activity improving across countries and sectors?
What is actually driving it: consumption, investment, government spending, or trade?
Is the rate of change accelerating or decelerating?
Are leading indicators confirming the story the headlines are telling?
Is the data surprising to the upside or downside relative to expectations?
Is the economy getting more resilient, or more fragile?
The level-versus-rate-of-change distinction does most of the work here. An economy can stay objectively strong while becoming meaningfully weaker; for markets, that transition often matters far more than the absolute level of GDP.
The goal is not to stamp the economy “strong” or “weak.” It is to locate where we are in the cycle, where we appear to be heading, and whether the odds of a regime change are rising.
L: Liquidity
Are financial conditions a tailwind or a headwind for asset prices?
I use liquidity broadly. It covers the macro forces that govern the availability, price, and direction of capital:
Monetary policy
Interest rates and real yields
Money and credit creation
Financial conditions
Inflation and inflation expectations
Policy expectations
The global liquidity cycle
Inflation belongs here because inflation changes the policy reaction function, and the reaction function sets the price and availability of liquidity itself.
A strong-growth world with abundant liquidity is a completely different animal from the same growth accompanied by rising inflation, tightening policy, and climbing real yields. That is why growth is never assessed on its own. The same growth impulse can produce very different outcomes depending on the liquidity regime around it.
R: Risk Appetite
How willing is the market to take risk, and how vulnerable is it to a change in behavior?
Risk appetite is the market’s internal state:
Volatility and volatility structure
Credit conditions
Market breadth
Positioning and flows
Correlations
Cross-asset stress
Market fragility and systemic risk
Regime behavior
This is not simply whether stocks are going up or down. A market can keep rising while quietly becoming more fragile underneath. A sharp selloff, on the other hand, does not automatically signal systemic stress.
So the framework watches for confirmation and non-confirmation across markets. Equities down hard while credit holds, volatility stays contained, and breadth is intact tells a very different story from equities down alongside widening spreads, rising correlations, thinning liquidity, and indiscriminate deleveraging. The job is to separate noise from contagion, correction from regime change, and volatility from genuine stress.
The G.L.R. regime
The power of G.L.R. is in reading the three together. No pillar acts alone.
A deterioration in Growth can be bullish for bonds, provided inflation is contained and Liquidity is improving. The same deterioration is far more damaging if inflation is stuck and policymakers cannot ease. Tightening Liquidity may barely register while Growth is strong and Risk Appetite is resilient, yet the same tightening can become destabilizing the moment growth weakens and fragility builds.
So the framework asks two questions. First: what combination of Growth, Liquidity, and Risk Appetite defines the current regime? And second, the more important one: which pillar is changing at the margin?
That second question is usually where the opportunity lives. Most of the time, honestly, the answer is that nothing much is changing at the margin, and the right move is to do nothing. That is by design. If I have an opinion on everything, I have authority on nothing.
The Four Pillars: the bottom-up market framework
G.L.R. tells us about the environment. The Four Pillars tell us what individual markets are actually saying, and where the opportunities sit. Every market can be read through four lenses.
Fundamentals
What should this asset be worth, based on its underlying drivers?
Fundamentals span macro and micro. Depending on the market, that means earnings, profitability, economic sensitivity, balance-sheet strength, commodity supply and demand, yield differentials, or whatever else structurally drives value.
Relative Value
What is cheap, expensive, or mispriced against comparable opportunities?
Markets rarely live in isolation. Relative value looks at the relationships: across asset classes, countries and regions, sectors and industries, factors and styles, and related securities. These relationships are often more informative, and more stable, than an outright directional call.
The question is not always whether equities should rise. It might be whether equities should beat bonds, whether one country should trail another, or whether cyclicals should beat defensives, for example.
Sentiment
What does the market believe, and how much of that belief is already in the price?
A great asset is not a great trade if everyone already owns it. Sentiment measures expectations, positioning, flows, implied beliefs, and how risk is distributed across participants. It is the bridge between what should happen and what the market already expects to happen. As ever, markets tend to swing from extremes in fear and euphoria, and it’s our job to identify when we may be at one of those extremes.
Technicals
What is price action telling us about how participants are behaving?
Prices are primal. Price is the verdict of every dollar vote; it encapsulates the perceptions, beliefs, motivations, and actions already alive in the market. So technicals are not lines drawn on a chart in a vacuum. They are observable evidence of behavior: trend, trend intensity, breadth, leadership, momentum, market structure, and vulnerability to reversal.
When the technical picture confirms the fundamental and macro thesis, conviction can rise. When it diverges, the divergence is worth chasing down.
From macro regime to investment decision
The framework organizes markets across four levels of decision, moving from broad directional risk toward increasingly granular relative value.
| Level | Investment Lens | The Question |
|---|---|---|
| **Level 1** | **Directional Markets** | Which major asset classes should rise or fall? |
| **Level 2** | **Cross-Asset Relative Value** | Which asset classes should outperform others? |
| **Level 3** | **Country & Regional Relative Value** | Where is the macro backdrop most and least favorable? |
| **Level 4** | **Sector & Style** | Where should leadership emerge within markets? |
This hierarchy matters because the best expression of a macro view is often not an outright directional trade.
Sometimes the strongest conclusion is not that “equities should fall,” but that “energy should outperform technology”, or “Semis and the Korean Won should outperform Software and the Yen”… Not that “bonds should rally,” but rather that “real yields should outperform nominal.” Not that “emerging markets are broadly cheap (or expensive)”, but that “commodity exporters should outperform energy importers.” The alpha often lives inside these subtle, often overlooked relative value opportunities.
The framework is built to search across the whole opportunity set, rather than force every observation into a binary bullish-or-bearish box.
Human judgment and systematic discipline
I am a systematic investor by training and by temperament. However, the goal was never to take human judgment out of investing. The goal is to make it better.
Models are exceptional at what they are good at: processing large amounts of information consistently, finding relationships, measuring historical analogues, and forcing discipline into the process. Humans are better at the rest: reading context, recognizing structural change, interpreting genuinely new events, and asking the questions historical data cannot answer on its own. We use history as a guide, but the framework exists to identify “what is different this time,” because that is where the real edge lives.
The framework is built around the interaction between the two. Machines provide the discipline. Humans provide the context. The feedback loop between them makes both sharper.
To me, one of the defining questions of this era is:
How can humans and AI make dramatically better decisions under uncertainty than either could alone?
That question sits at the heart of this framework. The process is iterative by design: signals sharpen into a view, the view informs a decision, the decision produces an outcome, and that outcome feeds back into the signals outcome generates feedback, that feedback helps to improve the signals, models, and decision-making process that follows. The process is the “key person.”
The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty or build a machine that predicts the future. It is to build a better system for reasoning, adapting, and making decisions when the future is inherently uncertain. Said another way, how do we get better at making better decisions?
The Macro Signal
The Macro Signal is this framework, put to work. Every piece of research is really trying to answer some version of the same questions: What is changing? What is the market pricing? Where are the meaningful divergences? What could flip the regime? And what does all of it actually mean for markets and portfolios?
There will always be more data, more news, more opinions, more predictions. My objective is the opposite of adding to that pile. It is to make the complex simple, the intractable relatable, and the noisy clear.
Know what matters.