How to Use the Taslos Indicators

The three questions

How fragile is the starting point? Some gauges measure how much damage a shock would do if one arrived. Is anything actually turning? Other gauges measure motion: whether labor and credit are inflecting right now. What breaks first if the stress is real? The newest gauge watches one specific chain, the debt behind the AI buildout, for signs that stress in one company is becoming stress in its counterparties. Fragility decides how bad. Inflection decides when. The site keeps the three apart on purpose.

The seven readings

RPI — recession probability, next 12 months. A logistic model over the yield curve, the Sahm rule, industrial production, building permits, and payroll growth. Read it as odds, not an alarm. It rarely prints above about 35% before a recession actually starts, so a reading under 10% means the model sees no recession trigger yet, not that recession is impossible.

LIG — labor inflection gauge (0–100). Pure labor: the Sahm rule, jobless claims, payroll momentum, and temporary-help employment. Every postwar recession is ultimately a labor event, so this is the gauge that separates a scare from a turn. It fires at 60 and has matched every recession since 1970, with a short list of named false positives printed next to it on the dashboard.

FSM — financial stress momentum (0–100). The credit channel, built to notice spreads widening from their lows, not just sitting at wide levels. It takes the worse of the Baa and high-yield widening legs and adds spread levels and bank conditions. When FSM fires, the question stops being whether and starts being how deep.

RPS — expected 10-year real return. What the starting valuation implies for a decade of stock returns, from the CAPE ratio through a regression fitted on data back to 1900. It is a valuation statement, not a forecast with timing. A deeply negative RPS can stay deeply negative for years while prices keep rising.

DRG — drawdown risk gauge (0–100). How bad a drawdown could be, from valuation percentiles, household equity allocation, market concentration, and margin leverage. High DRG with calm timing gauges is the 1998–2000 pattern: extreme fragility, no trigger, and a market that kept climbing anyway.

CSG — concentration and sync gauge. The top-10 share of the S&P 500's market value, plus how tightly the big indexes move together. It measures single-point-of-failure risk: when a handful of companies are the market, their problems become everyone's problems mechanically.

CDG — cross-default gauge (0–100, plus a state). The AI-chain gauge. Four layers score counterparty concentration, circular financing, the gap between committed spending and revenue, and market confirmation from credit default swaps and bond prices. The state matters as much as the level: the gauge alerts on state changes (NORMAL, ARMED, CONFIRMED, FIRED), not on small level wiggles.

The two dials

The Risk dial (R) blends the blocks into one 0–100 summary of overall risk pressure. The Credit dial (C) isolates the credit block. They are summaries for a quick glance, published as smoothed values. If a dial and a gauge disagree, believe the gauge and go read why.

The tripwire board

Tripwires are individual yes-or-no tests under the gauges: things like the VIX term structure inverting, high-yield spreads widening half a point off their low while stocks sit at highs, or temp-help employment falling year over year. The board counts how many are tripped and how many are on watch. Single wires trip in ordinary selloffs. What matters is breadth: stress showing up across unrelated wires at the same time.

A five-minute routine

Start with the Current Read at the top of the homepage. Check LIG and FSM: are the timing gauges moving, or is this still fragility only? Glance at the tripwire counts. Then read the newest entry on the Notes page, which is where changes get explained the day they happen. Stop there. The historic trend panels are for context on where a gauge has been, not for daily decisions.

What the site cannot do

Nothing here times a market top, and the backtests are printed with their false positives attached because a gauge that hides its misses is marketing, not measurement. Data arrives on its source's schedule: labor and credit series are monthly or quarterly, market prices are daily, and some gauges only change when a new print lands. A reading that has not moved in weeks usually means the input has not moved, not that nobody is watching.