A barometer, not a forecast

Crashboard takes thirty-four measures of financial stress, folds them into two numbers, and paints the screen by where today sits against every day since 1998. This guide explains what you are looking at, and what the two numbers are not.

The two numbers

Almost everything in the app is built from two readings. They answer different questions, they are built from completely separate evidence, and they are allowed to disagree — the disagreement is often the most interesting thing on the screen.

No indicator appears in both. That matters: when one lens moves and the other does not, it is because different evidence is pointing in different directions, not because of an accounting quirk.

Each reading runs from −1 to +1, though in practice both live in a much narrower range — which is why the app prints a σ figure beside every score, saying how unusual today is against the past 28 years, rather than asking you to judge whether −0.166 is a big number.

Reading the screen

Here is the app on an ordinary day. Nothing is hidden behind a menu; the whole model is on one page. The notes below key to it, top to bottom.

The main screen An ordinary day 14 September 2026

1. The headline and the colour The whole background is one number — the Conditions Ahead reading, coloured from green to red by where it sits against the record. You can tell what the app thinks from across the room without reading a digit.
2. Around the world The OFR stress index for the United States, other advanced economies and emerging markets. This is not our number: it is an independent index, shown as published, and it is free. "% Calm" says how much of the past 26 years was more stressed than today.
3. The two readings, on a σ scale Each lens shows its score, how many standard deviations that is from an average day, and a plain-English verdict, with a marker on a −3σ to +3σ rule.
4. What is driving it Every indicator, what it reads in its own terms, and what that contributes to the score. These are separate on purpose: "Geopolitical Risk, high, −0.12" tells you both that risk is elevated and that it is barely moving the needle. Faint rows are waiting on their next data release, not unimportant.
5. The recent past Six months of both lenses, each band coloured by where that day ranked against all 28 years. A washed-out stretch means the panel was split, not that nothing happened.
6. The whole record Twenty-eight years in two strips. Drag to scan, pick a date, or jump straight to the dot-com bust, 2008 or COVID with the buttons on the right.

Three days

The fastest way to learn the app is to visit three days. Every screen below is the same app, the same indicators and the same arithmetic. Only the date is different.

Crisis2008-10-16

Calm2012-12-14

Split2026-09-14

March 2020 is that last case in reverse: the present was acutely stressed while the outlook was supportive, because policy had already moved. Both were true at once. A single number would have had to pick one and would have been wrong either way.

Colour, σ, and the six verdicts

σ means "how unusual". Zero is an average day. −1σ is worse than about 84% of days in the record; −2σ is worse than about 97%. It says rare without pretending to say likely.

The verdicts are cut by rank, not by round numbers. The two alarm states between them cover one day in twenty, deliberately. A dashboard that calls one day in five a crisis has taught you to ignore it.

The history strips use the same scale. Hue is the score; how washed-out a band looks tells you how much the panel agreed. Grey is the app saying it does not know, which is information too.

Understanding its output

The most useful thing to know about Crashboard is what its two numbers are not. They are not prices, not an index and not a portfolio. They measure the plumbing — credit spreads, funding costs, lending standards, employment, borrowing costs — and the plumbing does not move in step with the market.

The two readings relate to each other, with a lag

Conditions Ahead measures pressure building; Conditions Now measures what has arrived. If the split works, Ahead should run in front. Slide the Ahead line eighteen months to the right and lay it over Now, and for most of the record the two sit on top of one another.

Neither one is the stock market

Here is the same chart with US equities laid underneath — how far the market had fallen from its previous high, on the right-hand scale. This is the comparison worth studying, because it separates two things that look identical on a news ticker.

A falling market is not by itself evidence that anything is wrong with the financial system — and a calm market is not evidence that nothing is. Crashboard is built to tell those two apart.

What that means when you open the app

• A red screen does not mean the market is down, and a green screen is not a buy signal. The colour is a reading of conditions, nothing else.
• The app can read calm while your portfolio falls. That is 2022, and it is not a malfunction — it is the app telling you the fall was about price, not about plumbing.
• It can also read badly after prices have already recovered, because credit and employment heal more slowly than markets do. Early 2009 looks like that.
• Conditions Ahead is not a market-timing signal. Its single lowest reading in the whole record came in June 2006. Two years later the crisis arrived — by which time the forward reading had eased back toward normal. It marks pressure, not a date.

What it will not do

• It will not tell you what to buy or sell. There are no positions, no signals and no targets, and the app has no idea what you own.
• It will not tell you the size or the timing of what is coming. The lowest single Conditions Ahead reading in the whole twenty-eight-year record came in June 2006, two years before the financial crisis. The pressure was real and it was measured. What the reading could not say was how large the event would be, or that it was still two years off.
• It cannot see what is not in the data. A pandemic, a war, a fraud — none of these are visible in credit spreads until they already are.
• Some indicators run late. Government data publishes on its own schedule; faint rows are waiting. Tap the ? beside any indicator for the date it is current through.
• Revisions happen. Macro data gets revised after the fact, so a reading for a day in 2008 is scored with the figures as they stand now.

Data, privacy and price

Where the numbers come from

Eight United States government sources: Federal Reserve Economic Data, the CFTC, Treasury Fiscal Data, the Office of Financial Research, the FDIC, the EIA, FEMA and the USGS. All public domain. This product uses FHFA data but is neither endorsed nor certified by FHFA. No licensed market data is used or republished, and the app refuses to publish a series it cannot legally carry — a rule enforced in code rather than by good intentions. Full attribution is in the app's About screen and on the home page.

What the app knows about you

Nothing. No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no advertising identifier and no tracking of any kind. The app downloads one public data file and does all the arithmetic on your device. See the privacy policy.

Free and paid

Conditions Now is free and stays free — the reading, every indicator behind it, the global stress panel, and the whole twenty-eight-year record of it. The subscription unlocks Conditions Ahead: its reading, its indicator panel and its history, for $29.99 per year, auto-renewing until cancelled. Payment is charged to your Apple Account at confirmation; it renews unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the period ends, and you can manage or cancel it in your Apple Account settings. Cancellation and refunds are covered on the support page.