Markets: Market structure, the macro cycle, and reading the tape

This category explains the environment every position is taken in. It starts with plumbing: how exchanges match orders, what market makers and specialists do, the role of electronic communication networks and dark pools, and why the same stock can print different prices across venues in the same second. Settlement, short interest reporting, halts and circuit breakers, and the difference between the regular session and extended hours are covered because each of them can determine what happens to an order you have already placed.

Indices come next, and the construction details matter more than most investors assume. The S&P 500 is capitalisation-weighted, so a handful of the largest companies can move it while the median constituent falls; the Dow is price-weighted, which makes it an artefact of share prices rather than company size; equal-weighted versions of the same index tell a materially different story about market health. That leads directly into breadth — advance-decline lines, new highs against new lows, the percentage of members above their 200-day average — and into the eleven GICS sectors, their differing sensitivity to rates and the economic cycle, and how rotation between them tends to lead the broad index.

The macro lessons connect data releases to asset prices. Federal Reserve policy, the federal funds rate, quantitative easing and tightening, and why the yield curve’s shape has historically carried information about the cycle ahead. Inflation measurement through CPI and PCE and the difference between headline and core. The employment report, GDP, PMIs, retail sales, and consumer sentiment, each with the market’s typical reaction function and the reasons it sometimes reverses. The relationship between bonds and equities, the effect of the dollar on multinational earnings, and how commodities and international markets fit into the same framework.

The remaining articles cover market behaviour over time: earnings season and how guidance moves prices more than reported results, bull and bear market definitions, corrections against crashes, volatility and what the VIX actually prices, IPO and lockup dynamics, index inclusion effects, and a run of lessons on market history — 1929, 1987, the dot-com unwind, 2008, and the 2020 drawdown — read for the mechanisms that repeat rather than for the dates.