Three-Dial Macro Dashboard

The purpose of the dashboard

The three-dial dashboard turns the USD Impact framework into a repeatable weekly process.

It is designed to answer one question before you interpret gold, oil, Bitcoin, equities or FX:

What kind of dollar environment are these assets trading inside?

The dashboard does not produce a buy/sell instruction. It records a configuration of observable conditions so that the interpretation can be compared with later evidence.

Dial 1 — Dollar direction

What to record

• DXY direction over the completed observation window;
• whether the move is persistent or mostly intraday noise;
• whether a broader Federal Reserve dollar measure confirms the move;
• whether major FX pairs suggest a broad USD move or a currency-specific story.

Questions to ask

• Is the dollar firmer, softer or broadly rangebound?
• Is breadth confirming DXY?
• Does the move look rate-led, stress-led or driven by foreign-currency developments?

Do not do this

Do not create a separate “fourth dial” for broad USD. Breadth is a confirmation check inside Dial 1.

Dial 2 — Real-rate pressure

What to record

• 10-year TIPS yield direction;
• relevant nominal Treasury yield direction;
• whether real and nominal yields are telling the same story;
• whether the rate move is large enough to matter relative to recent ranges.

Questions to ask

• Are real yields applying more or less valuation pressure?
• Does the rate move support the dollar move?
• Is inflation compensation, rather than real rates, driving the nominal-yield change?

Do not do this

Do not infer real-rate pressure from the nominal 10-year yield alone.

Dial 3 — Liquidity stress

What to record

• credit spreads widening or tightening;
• VIX / volatility direction;
• notable funding-market or banking stress;
• central-bank liquidity operations where relevant;
• whether risk assets show broad stress or isolated weakness.

Questions to ask

• Are markets becoming easier or harder to fund?
• Is dollar strength occurring alongside stress?
• Are credit and volatility confirming a risk-off interpretation?

Do not do this

Do not reduce “liquidity” to one balance-sheet number. Funding, credit and market stress can change even when a central-bank balance sheet is stable.

The weekly worksheet

Use a simple table so the evidence is visible before the narrative is written.

The confidence label is a note about evidence quality, not a probability of future returns.

Convert the observations into a regime description

After recording the dials, summarize the week in one sentence without forecasting.

Examples:

• Rate-led firm-dollar environment: dollar firmer, real yields rising, stress contained.
• Stress-led firm-dollar environment: dollar firmer, real rates mixed, liquidity stress rising.
• Easier soft-dollar environment: dollar softer, real rates falling, stress easing.
• Mixed / transitional environment: the three dials disagree or breadth is weak.

Avoid labels that imply certainty about the next asset move.

Add cross-asset confirmation after the dials

Only after the three-dial reading is written should you check how major assets behaved.

Ask:

• Did gold behave consistently with the real-rate and risk environment?
• Did oil respond mainly to the dollar or to its own supply/demand news?
• Did equities confirm easier/tighter financial conditions?
• Did Bitcoin move with broad liquidity/risk appetite or on crypto-specific drivers?
• Did FX breadth support the DXY interpretation?

Cross-asset behavior can confirm or challenge the macro story. It is not an extra dial.

Worked example

Assume the completed week shows:

• DXY firmer and the broader dollar also firmer;
• 10-year TIPS yield higher;
• credit spreads broadly stable and VIX contained;
• gold softer while equities are mixed.

A disciplined summary could be:

The completed week showed a broadly firmer dollar with higher real-rate pressure but no clear liquidity-stress confirmation, making the configuration more consistent with a rate-led firm-dollar environment than a funding squeeze. Gold weakness was directionally consistent with the rate channel, while mixed equities limited the strength of the cross-asset confirmation.

Notice what this does not say. It does not predict where DXY, gold or equities must move next.

What happens when the dials disagree?

Disagreement is a valid result.

For example:

• DXY firmer;
• real yields falling;
• volatility rising;
• broad USD confirmation mixed.

Do not average this into a false “neutral” conclusion immediately. Instead identify the contradiction and investigate the likely source:

• foreign-currency weakness affecting DXY;
• stress-driven dollar demand;
• asset-specific repricing;
• timing differences between markets.

A mixed configuration can contain more information than a clean label.

How this connects to the rest of USD Impact

Learn cards explain individual concepts such as DXY, real rates and liquidity stress.

Daily USD Impact identifies verified events and the transmission channels they may affect.

The three-dial dashboard organizes the current macro configuration.

The weekly USD Impact Score is a separate systematic cross-asset indicator with a published methodology. It should not be substituted for the three-dial qualitative framework, and the qualitative framework should not be presented as the Score formula.

Weekly Briefs combine the completed week’s sourced developments with the archived Score snapshot and broader interpretation.

This separation keeps educational explanation, external facts and systematic measurement distinct.

A five-minute weekly routine

1. Record DXY direction and broad-dollar confirmation.
2. Record 10-year TIPS direction and nominal-rate context.
3. Record credit/volatility/funding stress direction.
4. Write one non-predictive regime sentence.
5. Check gold, oil, equities, Bitcoin and FX for confirmation or contradiction.
6. Record unresolved contradictions instead of deleting them from the narrative.
7. Compare the reading with the published weekly Score without assuming they measure the same thing.

Key takeaway

The dashboard has three dials:

Dollar direction → Real-rate pressure → Liquidity stress

Broad-dollar breadth and cross-asset behavior are confirmation layers. Their purpose is to test the interpretation, not expand the framework into additional dials.

Start with the dials. Then trace the mechanism with the Dollar Transmission Chain.