Methodology

Nine series power the site. Each comes from a free, publicly available source.

Twelve Data's free tier does not include direct index quotes for the Nasdaq 100 (NDX), the S&P 500 (SPX), or the Dollar Index (DXY). To stay free, the site uses three highly correlated proxies:

• QQQ — the Invesco QQQ Trust ETF, which tracks the Nasdaq 100 index. Daily-close correlation with NDX exceeds 99.9%. Percent change is effectively identical.
• SPY — the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, which tracks the S&P 500 index. The benchmark chart multiplies SPY by a fixed scaling factor (currently ~10.58) to express the value in SPX terms. The factor drifts very slowly as SPY pays quarterly dividends, but on a 40-year log chart with multi-thousand-point scale the drift is invisible.
• UUP — the Invesco DB US Dollar Index Bullish Fund, which tracks DXY. UUP trades only on US market days, while DXY is essentially 24/5; close-to-close correlation is over 99%.

The percent-change figures shown on the homepage will track the underlying indexes closely but will not always match the headline number on, say, Bloomberg or TradingView to two decimal places.

FRED publishes several Fed funds series. The site uses DFEDTARU — the upper bound of the FOMC target range — rather than DFF (the daily effective rate).

DFF moves a few basis points day-to-day inside the target band, which would create misleading "change points" between FOMC meetings. DFEDTARU only changes when the Fed actually announces a rate decision, which is what the chart is meant to show.

XAUT is Tether Gold — a token redeemable for physical gold held in a Swiss vault. USDT is Tether's US dollar stablecoin. The ratio of their market caps (XAUT mcap ÷ USDT mcap) is a clean read on a single question: relative to stablecoin dollar liquidity, how much capital is parked in tokenized gold?

A rising ratio suggests on-chain capital rotating toward hard-asset exposure — gold's thesis strengthening within the crypto ecosystem itself. A falling ratio suggests the opposite: stablecoin USD growing faster than tokenized gold, consistent with risk-on positioning.

One caveat. XAUT market cap moves with both the underlying gold price and the supply of tokens. USDT market cap moves only with supply, since it is pegged to one dollar. A gold price rally therefore pumps the ratio even if no new XAUT is minted. This is not a flaw — it is part of the signal — but the line should be read as a blend of gold price action and on-chain demand, not pure demand alone.

The 10-year chart compares Bitcoin, Gold, and the Nasdaq 100 (via QQQ) against US M2 money supply — the broad measure of dollars in the system, including currency, deposits, and money-market funds. M2 is published monthly by the Federal Reserve via FRED.

Every line on the chart starts at 1× on the same baseline date. The Y-axis is a log scale, which lets a 100× line (Bitcoin) and a 5× line (QQQ) share the same view without flattening the smaller movers. The dashed gray line is M2 itself — the pace of dollar expansion.

The stat row above the chart shows outperformance vs M2: each asset's percent change minus M2's percent change over the same window. Once outperformance crosses +1000%, it is shown as a multiple ("113.9x") rather than a percent, since the percent figures become unwieldy.

Historical monthly closes for Bitcoin (Coinbase, since Dec 2014), Gold (TVC), and QQQ (BATS) were imported as one-time snapshots. From those baselines forward, the daily refresh writes a fresh "current month" close every day, locking the value when the month rolls over.

The cycle-repeat chart asks a single, blunt question: what happens to Bitcoin if the last four years simply play out again from here?

The chart is split in half by today's date. The left half shows the real Bitcoin price over the previous four years — daily closes from Bitstamp, sourced via TradingView. The right half is the same price path replayed forward, day for day, rebased so that the very first projected point matches today's actual price. From that anchor, every subsequent projected price keeps the same ratio to the anchor that the corresponding past point had to its anchor four years earlier. The shape of the next four years is, by construction, identical to the last four — only the scale shifts.

The window is set at four years deliberately. Bitcoin's halving cadence is roughly four years, and post-halving bull runs followed by bear-market bottoms are the central pattern cycle theorists track. A two-year window would chop the cycle in half; an eight-year window would blur two cycles together. Four years matches the actual rhythm.

The four stat boxes above the chart anchor the narrative: current price, previous top (the real all-time high of the last four years), projected bottom (the lowest point of the right-half projection, with the date it would land on), and projected top (the highest point of the projection). Tops are green; bottoms are red.

This is not a forecast. It is a "what if" — a literal replay of the most recent cycle, dressed up as a projection. Markets do not repeat themselves exactly; halving-cycle theory is one frame among many; and the projection ignores monetary policy, ETF flows, regulation, geopolitics, and everything else that actually moves price. Treat the right half as a vibe check on what a textbook cycle would look like, not as a price target.

The chart slides forward one day every day. As today's anchor advances, the past slice shifts with it (so older data drops off the left edge) and the projection re-anchors to today's price (so the right edge gets pulled forward too). Practically, this means the projected bottom and projected top dates both shift one day closer with each passing day.

The benchmark chart at the bottom of the homepage answers a simple question: how much of each hard asset does it take to buy one share of the S&P 500? The same index is plotted three times on a single log axis — once priced in US dollars, once in grams of gold, and once in Bitcoin.

The reason for plotting it this way is that "the S&P 500 going up" tells you very little on its own. Up against what? If the dollar is being debased faster than the index is rising, then the index is losing real purchasing power even while the headline number climbs. Pricing the index in gold and Bitcoin strips out dollar depreciation and reveals the true performance of US equities against alternative stores of value.

How to read each line. The Y-axis is "how much of that thing it costs to buy one share of the S&P." So when a line goes down, it takes less of that asset to buy the index — meaning the asset is gaining ground against US equities. When a line goes up, it takes more of that asset, meaning the asset is losing ground. Counterintuitive at first, but consistent across all three lines.

The historical stories the chart reveals.The yellow gold line shows two great gold decades. From 1984 to 1999, it took progressively more gold to buy the S&P — gold lost badly against the dot-com runup. Then from 2000 to 2011, gold did exactly the opposite, falling from ~170g per share to ~25g — gold quintupled against US equities. The orange Bitcoin line tells the most extreme story of all: in 2009 a share of the S&P cost roughly 1,500,000 BTC. Today it costs under 0.1 BTC. Bitcoin has appreciated roughly 10,000,000× against the index in 16 years — there is no precedent for this in any modern financial dataset.

Why log scale. The three lines span seven orders of magnitude — from 0.05 BTC at the bottom to over 1,000,000 BTC at the top. On a linear axis only the largest number would be visible. Log scale shows percent moves at equal visual height regardless of price level.

Why 1984.The chart window starts in 1984 because that is when the gold monthly history (TVC) begins. The S&P 500 series itself extends back to 1871, and Bitcoin only starts in 2009, so 1984 is the earliest date where at least two of the three series are present.

The Jan 2020 comparison.Each of the three stat boxes above the chart shows the latest value and the value in January 2020 — a deliberately chosen pre-pandemic baseline. The comparison number is not a percent or a multiple; it is the raw price in the same unit. The intent is to make "the S&P used to cost X of this, now it costs Y" a single glance.

• Today's change — the latest available close versus the prior close, expressed as a percent.
• YTD change — the latest close versus the first available close on or after January 1 of the current year. Because Jan 1 is a holiday for traditional markets, the baseline may be Jan 2 or later for those series.
• Moving averages — the 7-day, 50-day, and 200-day chips show the current price as a percent deviation from the simple mean of the prior N daily closes.
• Fed funds YTD — change in basis points between the rate in effect on Jan 1 and the rate in effect today. If the Fed hasn't moved this year, this reads 0 bps.
• XAUT / USDT ratio — daily XAUT market cap divided by daily USDT market cap, taken from CoinGecko. The chart shows the percent change from the start of the selected timeframe. "$1 USDT buys X XAUT" is the raw ratio. The 365-day percentile shows where the current ratio sits in the distribution of the last 365 daily values — 100th means the highest in a year, 1st means the lowest.
• Hard money vs M2 — each asset's monthly close is divided by its baseline value 10 years ago to produce a growth multiple. The stat boxes subtract M2's percent change from each asset's percent change to express outperformance.
• Bitcoin cycle repeat — let P(t) be Bitcoin's close on day t, T be today, and A = T − 4 years. For each projected day T + k (where k runs from 1 to ~1460), the projected price is P(T) × P(A + k) / P(A). Projected top and projected bottom are the max and min of this projected series.
• S&P priced three ways — for each month, the S&P value in gold grams equals (SPX ÷ gold_oz) × 31.1035, since gold is quoted per troy ounce. The S&P value in BTC equals SPX ÷ BTC_USD. The current-month SPX value is approximated by multiplying today's SPY close by a fixed factor of ~10.58, recalibrated annually.

Prices refresh once per day via a scheduled job that runs at 03:00 UTC (~1pm Sydney, ~10pm previous-day New York). The job pulls the most recent week of closes from each source and upserts into the database, so any late corrections from the providers get picked up automatically.

The monthly series (Bitcoin, Gold, Nasdaq, S&P 500, M2) are kept fresh by the same daily job. Each day, the current month's monthly row gets overwritten with the latest close; when the month rolls over, a new row is created and the previous month's value locks in place.

Intraday quotes are not shown. The site is designed for daily-close reading, not live trading.

Daily closes are stored in a Postgres database (Supabase). The site is a Next.js application deployed on Vercel. Source data is read directly from the database on each page load; nothing is cached longer than the next deployment.

Nothing on this site is financial advice. Numbers are sourced in good faith from third-party providers but are not guaranteed to be accurate, complete, or timely. Anyone making a financial decision should verify against the original sources.