What is an asset worth when it is measured in other assets instead of dollars?
Every price is a ratio. Quoting everything in dollars hides most of them. We look at all of them.
Dollars move too
A price in dollars mixes the asset's own story with inflation and currency moves. A rising chart can simply be a falling ruler.
Every pair tells its own story
Stocks in ounces of gold, homes in units of the stock market, oil in Treasury bonds. Each ratio shows how one part of the economy is valued against another.
Signal or noise
Our aim is to find which of these relationships carry lasting information about the economic and market cycle, and which are noise.
Built to avoid fooling ourselves
Long history, strict testing and a high bar. Many ideas were tested and most were dropped. What counts is persistence across time and markets, not a good-looking chart.
Stocks, bonds, precious metals, real estate, commodities, credit and currencies, from public sources.
Every test uses only information that was available at that moment in history.
An idea is kept only if it holds up in two separate periods of history.
What five decades of relative prices suggest
Research observations about how markets have behaved. They describe the past and are not predictions.
Cheap is not a timing signal
Relative prices that looked extreme often stayed extreme for years when tested in real time.
Big moves tend to persist
Long moves between assets lasted longer than most people expect, in line with a large body of academic work.
Markets talk to each other
Some cross-market relationships appear to reflect the economic and credit cycle.
Breadth beats any single idea
Looking across many unrelated markets told us more than any one ratio on its own.
Further reading: Moskowitz, Ooi and Pedersen, "Time Series Momentum", Journal of Financial Economics (2012).
Explore the ratios yourself
Our research tool re-prices ten assets in each other, back to 1970. It is free to use and shows historical data only.
- Pick any unit of accountDollars, gold, silver, oil, Treasuries, homes or a stock index.
- Pair explorerSee how many of one asset buy another, and where today sits in its full history.
- Ratio mapA grid of every pair, showing how stretched each relationship is today.
An independent global macro research company
SilverMacro studies global markets through relative prices. Our work covers equities, bonds, precious metals, real estate and commodities, built on public data and methods that can be checked.
We write for family offices, institutional investors and research partners who want a view of markets that does not depend on the dollar as the only yardstick.
A conversation about the research
We welcome an experienced view on our method, ideas for research or data partnerships, and requests for a walkthrough.
contact@silvermacro.com