How it works

What it reads. How long the country runs if imports stopped tomorrow. It makes reserves of wildly different absolute sizes comparable, which raw tonnes never do.

So what, for you. Thailand at 108 days and India at 9.5 are not the same investment. An oil spike passes through India's currency and fuel bill almost immediately; Thailand has three months of absorber. If you hold both, size the India position for the shorter fuse.

What it reads. Below roughly 20% grain prices stop responding to demand smoothly and start jumping. World rice is currently comfortable, which is the single best piece of news in the resource picture for a Thai household budget.

So what, for you. Comfortable stocks argue against holding agricultural commodity funds as an inflation hedge right now. The inflation you face is energy and currency, not food.

What it reads. About 67 years. Everything ever mined is still here, and a year of world mining adds roughly 1.5% to it. That one ratio is the entire argument for gold as a monetary asset rather than a commodity: no price rise can conjure meaningful new supply.

So what, for you. This is why a gold allocation is a structural decision, not a trade. It also means the gold price is set by who wants to hold the existing stock, not by mine output news.

What it reads. Reserves are spread around the world; the furnaces that turn ore into usable material are not. A country that mines something it cannot process does not control it.

So what, for you. Nothing to trade — this is not priced daily. It is a reason to hold some gold and to check whether your equity funds are concentrated in manufacturers whose input list runs through one country.

What it reads. The cleanest way to separate a monetary story from an energy story. If both gold and oil are rising but the ratio is flat, that is money losing value. If the ratio is falling, it is a genuine energy supply problem.

So what, for you. Directly useful: it tells you whether your gold holding is hedging the thing you actually face. Against a supply-driven oil shock, gold is a poor hedge and energy equity is a better one.

What it reads. The single best-known proxy for whether money is being added to or drained from markets, read as a 13-week change rather than a level.

So what, for you. Read as a lead, not a signal. When it turns down it has historically pressured emerging market equity — which includes the SET — with a one-to-two month lag. It is a reason to slow down new buying, not to sell.

What it reads. Inversion has preceded most US recessions, with a long and variable lag.

So what, for you. Too slow to act on alone. Its use here is as one input to the growth axis of the regime map, which is what actually drives the recommendations.

What it reads. The hurdle rate for every other asset on earth, and the single biggest driver of the gold price after the dollar.

So what, for you. Above 2.5% is the level at which holding cash starts genuinely competing with owning growth equities. It is also the standard argument against gold — which is why gold rising through a high real yield, as it has, is worth noticing.

What it reads. One signed number per country, comparable across countries that report differently.

So what, for you. Thailand is +18 and India is −80.5. That gap is the reason a single oil shock produces two very different equity outcomes across two markets a non-specialist would lump together as 'Asia'.

What it reads. Above roughly 20%, official institutions rather than jewellers or investors are setting the marginal gold price — and central banks are famously price-insensitive buyers.

So what, for you. The most under-appreciated fact in the resource data: 2025 official buying FELL 21% and gold still made a record. Something other than central banks is bidding, which makes the rally less structurally safe than the 'central banks are buying' story implies.

What it reads. Thailand imports oil, so intuition says the SET should fall when oil rises. In practice the index is heavy in PTT and energy-linked names, so the relationship is often the opposite of the intuition. This measures which one is true right now.

So what, for you. Decides whether your SET holding is already an oil hedge or needs one. If the correlation is positive, buying an energy fund on top of a SET position is doubling a bet you already have.

What it reads. A slow structural ranking, not a market signal. It moves once a year at most.

So what, for you. Useful for deciding where a decade-long allocation sits, not what to do this quarter. Indonesia and Malaysia score well; Singapore and Japan score badly and compensate with capital and institutions, which this score cannot see.

What it reads. Negative means bonds have tended to rise when shares fell. Positive means the two have moved together, so a conventional stock–bond portfolio is carrying less diversification than its labels imply.

So what, for you. This belongs in the hero row because it answers whether the portfolio's main shock absorber is working now. A positive reading argues for treating cash and explicit inflation protection as separate diversifiers instead of assuming bonds will do both jobs.

What it reads. Dollar commodity indices understate what a Thai household pays, because the baht usually weakens in the same move that lifts oil. This multiplies the two so the compounding is visible in one line.

So what, for you. When this is rising fast, two things follow for you personally: your cost of living is going up before the CPI print says so, and unhedged foreign-currency assets are quietly protecting you. It is an argument for holding some savings outside the baht, not for trading anything.

What it reads. High price with full warehouses is a positioning or tariff story and tends to reverse. High price with empty warehouses is real scarcity and tends to persist. The subtraction is what separates them.

So what, for you. Tells you whether an oil spike is likely to fade before it reaches your electricity bill. Only a genuinely scarce spike justifies changing anything in a portfolio.

What it reads. At the current 1.85x COMEX/LME ratio the discount factor is 0.575 — copper's growth signal is being marked down by 42.5% because a large part of the price is a border, not a factory.

So what, for you. Stops you buying cyclicals and ASEAN exporters on a copper rally that is really a tariff trade. When the raw copper z-score and this number disagree, believe this one.

What it reads. The four things that actually move a Thai household's monthly outgoings, in one number, measured in the currency it is paid in. Negative means pressure.

So what, for you. This is a personal-finance number before it is an investment one. Sustained pressure means your real savings rate is falling even if your salary is not, and that argues for holding more of your emergency cash in a form that keeps up — not for taking more investment risk to compensate.

What it reads. A 20% oil move does not mean the same thing in Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. This scales the world shock by how exposed each country's import bill actually is, which is the number that eventually shows up in the current account and then in the currency.

So what, for you. The bridge from a headline you read to your own currency. A sustained positive reading for Thailand is the earliest warning that the baht has a problem coming — usually one to two quarters before the trade data confirms it.

What it reads. Your return on gold is the PRODUCT of the metal and the currency. Gold in baht can rise while gold in dollars falls, and vice versa — and the financial press only ever reports the dollar one.

So what, for you. Judge every gold decision on this line, not the CNBC line. It also explains why gold works as a baht hedge: the same events that weaken the baht usually lift dollar gold, so the two effects compound in your favour.

What it reads. Credit usually breaks before equity does, and it breaks at the bottom first. This is the extra yield demanded from the worst-rated borrowers over the high-yield market as a whole. It widens when lenders start declining the weakest deals — which is where the AI build-out's marginal financing actually happens — even while the index looks calm.

So what, for you. You almost certainly do not own CCC paper, so read this as a warning light on everything else rather than a position. When it widens while AI equities hold up, the lenders are disagreeing with the shareholders, and lenders see the cash flows first. Worth doing the breakeven arithmetic before envying the yield: price change on a credit position is roughly −(spread duration × change in spread), so at a spread duration near 3 years the 9.91pp of extra yield is wiped out by about 330bp of widening inside a year. The tail has already moved ~82bp in three months. That is what 'high yield is not high return' means arithmetically. For a Thai investor the transmission is indirect but real: a US AI-credit event tightens global conditions, lifts the dollar and pulls foreign money out of ASEAN — the dollar_pressure gauge is where you would feel it, not this one.

What it reads. A deliberately crude tally across independent parts of the system, because the framework's central claim is that no single metric calls this — four unrelated things deteriorating together is the signal. Denominating in percent-of-maximum means a score built from four scorable categories is comparable to one built from ten, instead of silently reading low because six were missing.

So what, for you. Momentum matters more than level: a move from 30% to 55% in two months is a louder signal than a year parked at 50%. The framework's critical overrides bypass the score entirely — a hyperscaler cutting capex for return reasons, a frontier lab taking rescue financing, or a large AI-infrastructure borrower failing to refinance is Red on its own, whatever this reads. For a Thai investor the practical response is not to trade the AI complex but to check how much of your supposedly diversified foreign exposure is the same eight stocks.