Methodology & Sources — RiskCurve
This page documents exactly where the data on RiskCurve comes from, how it is transformed, and how often it updates — so every number on the site can be traced to its source.
Primary sources. Treasury yields, real yields, breakevens, the federal funds rate, inflation indices and employment series are read through the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) API from: the U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury par yields, High Quality Market corporate spot rates), the Federal Reserve Board (H.15 rates, GSW zero-coupon real yields), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (CPI, PPI, payrolls, unemployment), the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (GDP, PCE), the Chicago Fed (NFCICREDIT credit subindex) and the St. Louis Fed (STLFSI4 financial stress index). The CBOE VIX is published by Cboe and read through FRED.
Sources under review. Index levels for the S&P 500 and the U.S. dollar index, and the fed funds futures curve, are currently fetched from Yahoo Finance. We consider that an unofficial feed with no service guarantee and are working to replace it. No page on this site claims otherwise.
Perpetuals panel. The perps ticker and the candlestick panel it opens are live Hyperliquid market data, read from Hyperliquid’s public Info API (api.hyperliquid.xyz/info) directly in your browser rather than through our servers, so those prices are as current as the feed itself and are not a cached snapshot. Names prefixed "xyz:" are perpetual futures on that venue, not spot prices: perpetuals trade around the clock, including when the underlying market is closed, so their price can differ from an official closing level and is not directly comparable to the daily close shown elsewhere on this site. Hyperliquid documents a REST weight limit of 1200 requests per minute per IP; we poll well inside it. Charts are drawn with TradingView’s Lightweight Charts library, which shows its attribution mark on the chart.
Series we no longer publish. The ICE BofA high-yield and investment-grade option-adjusted spread series (BAMLH0A0HYM2, BAMLC0A0CM) are designated pre-approval required on FRED, and ICE terms do not permit redistribution without written consent. We removed them from every page, dataset and chart.
Derived series. Where a figure is not published directly, we derive it and say so on the page. The investment-grade credit spread shown here is a proxy: the Treasury High Quality Market 10-year corporate spot rate (HQMCB10YR) minus the 10-year Treasury yield, matched to the same month-end date. Index series such as CPI and PCE are published as price levels, so we compute year-over-year change for display. Payrolls are shown as the month-over-month change.
Update cadence. A scheduled job runs twice daily — once in the morning, once in the evening — and fetches each active series, stores the observations in our database, and rebuilds the cached values and chart snapshots that feed this site. Each indicator page shows an explicit "as of" date so you always know the vintage of the data you are reading, and pages label monthly series "Latest" rather than "Today".
Limitations. Government series are revised after first publication; we store the latest vintage and flag revisions where they occur. Some series publish with a lag — shelter inflation and GDP in particular — so the most recent data point may describe a period that has already passed. Chart snapshots are generated daily and may lag the underlying data by one scheduled run.
Questions, corrections or data requests? Get in touch. See also our Methodology & Sources and Disclaimer.