Market Health

Every other read on the dashboard is about one stock. Market Health is about the tape itself — four percentile scores that together answer "is the market environment healthy or fragile right now?" Each is read the same way: higher is healthier.

Unlike a stock, the market has no cross-section to rank against, so each tile ranks today against its own past — where the reading sits versus its trailing ~5 years. A 70 means "healthier than 70% of the last five years," not "70 out of 100 stocks."

The four tiles

• Stability — the inverse of the VIX (options-implied 30-day volatility). High = calm; low = the options market is pricing turbulence. This is the one tile validated as a forward signal: a low Stability reading (a high VIX percentile) has historically preceded rising volatility and drawdowns. The other three are context.
• Trend — how far the S&P sits above its 200-day average. High = comfortably in an uptrend; low = below its long-term trend.
• Breadth — whether the average stock is participating, read from the advance/decline line's recent slope. High = broad participation; low = a few names carrying a thinning tape. Breadth can quietly disagree with price.
• Volume — where the money is going: dollar volume into advancing vs declining names. High = buying conviction; low = distribution under the surface.

How to read it

Read the colors first — green tiles are healthy, red are weak, amber is mixed. One red tile in a sea of green is usually noise; Trend and Breadth turning red together is the read that matters — that's the market rolling over with the average stock confirming it.

Two flags sit above the tiles:

• Healthy regime / Risk-off regime engaged — a binary, walk-forward-validated defensive flag: the S&P below its 40-week average and volatility in the top fifth of the past year. When it engages, the environment has historically been genuinely defensive.
• ▲ Breadth thrust — a rare wash-out-to-surge in participation that has marked capitulation bottoms (a handful per decade). When it lights up it's a re-entry signal, not a warning — the kind of broad, violent turn that starts durable recoveries.

The one caveat

Market Health describes the regime, not a trade. A healthy regime is the wind at your back, not a buy signal; a risk-off regime is a caution, not a forecast. The scores tell you what kind of market you're in — momentum names tend to work in a healthy tape, defense earns its keep in a fragile one — but none of them times the exact turn.