Pawel Kudzia – Macrobond Help

Please Read: An update from your team at Macrobond

Quite a bit has changed recently, including the app homepage, all new branding and our second release of the year just around the corner! This post is an update from the Product Team at Macrobond with details on what’s happening, when and why…

Welcome to the first blog post from the Product Team at Macrobond! We’re going to use these blog posts going forward to keep our community updated with relevant news, updates, and to ensure you all know how to get in touch with feedback about the things you love about Macrobond (and perhaps some of the things you don’t!).

App Start Page

If you came to this post from the application homepage, you’ll likely have noticed some changes.

First off, we want to acknowledge that there haven’t been many updates for a while - our apologies for that. We’re not fans of letting things go stale, but as you'll see in this post, we hit pause on a few things to focus our energy on some exciting new developments. Thanks for bearing with us.

At the time of publication, you may also have noticed that some historical posts have disappeared from the feed. This is due to the launch of our new website and brand materials (more on that below).

Rest assured, all the charts from our previous Charts of the Week and Blog posts are still available to you in the chart library. This has also had a revamp and a tidy up, more on that below.

The homepage itself will continue to go through a few changes in the months ahead – we’re planning to add in new training materials as well some new features to make the app quicker and easier to navigate. If you’ve any ideas on what you’d like to see, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line here.

Branding & Website

Our marketing team have been hard at work over the last couple of months updating our look and our messaging. We’ve gone for something fresh and clean but with some great colors and content to really make things pop. We hope you love it as much as we do!

Websites & Style Sheets

The first major thing you’ll notice is the corporate website (www.macrobond.com) has completely changed. I won’t list the changes as it’s a ground-up re-write so basically everything has changed 😊

Something else you may have noticed is the in-app branding, specifically the default style sheet has also changed. Anywhere you’re using the default style sheet (rather than your corporate one), you’ll notice the Macrobond logo and the chart colors for your existing charts have all been updated to match the new branding. If you notice any issues, our support team are there to assist – https://redir.macrobond.com/go/support

Finally, release notes and help.macrobond.com. As well as the corporate website changing we’re also working on overhauling our help site. As part of those changes, our release notes will now be published on the technical help site, rather than the corporate site as we felt this was the more logical place for them to live.

We’ll keep you updated as plans evolve for further changes to the help site but we’re looking at everything from improved navigation, to content and training, better search capabilities, more video and tutorial content and of course, AI helper agents.

Again – all thoughts and ideas appreciated you can reach us here.

Content

Another hot topic in the community has been Charts of the Week, or rather, the lack thereof. The decision to stop publishing CotW earlier wasn’t taken lightly. We know lots of our community found the posts useful, but we also felt it was time to change things up a bit. So, whilst we’ve taken down one publication, we’re going to replace it not with one, but with five new initiatives!

Macro Trends –A monthly review of the top economic themes paired with charts and thought leadership from the Macrobond team.

Macro Charts – A weekly chart publication highlighting the week’s major economic releases.

Macro Moves – The one you all demanded most – A monthly publication featuring charts from the top 10 most used data sets on the platform.

Macro Segments – A monthly chart pack with insights tailored to your individual business domain.

Ask Macrobond – Another monthly publication featuring the most requested charts from our community. We’ll be running polls on LinkedIn to capture your thoughts, keep an eye out and get your voice heard!

Chart library changes

The chart library is an invaluable resource and something many of our users utilize regularly. It contains charts and publications going all the way back to 2019 as well as training materials and chart packs for specific geographies and sectors to get people going quickly with key data and charts. However, after six years of updates, we felt it was time for a bit of a tidy up.

So, our content team have been hard at work reviewing everything and we’ve made some changes to make the organization cleaner and simpler to navigate as well as removing out-of-date content. Those changes will go live with the upcoming release on June 2nd.

One important note – if you have links to any of the charts in the Chart Library embedded in PowerPoint / Excel or Word documents, those will need to be updated to reflect the new chart location in the chart library. This will also apply to anything you’ve cross-linked into a website or other distribution platform.

Any concerns, please contact our support team via https://redir.macrobond.com/go/support and we’ll assist.

New Release

Last but by no means least, we have our second release of the year coming soon. We’re targeting Monday June 2nd for the update to go live so keep an eye out for the in-app banner notifying you of the new version.

As always, there will be full release notes on the day but a couple of teasers – we’ve added SSO support so no more email and passwords and we’ve made improvements to the data search and navigation including popularity indicators for different series. There’s also a raft of updates and additions to our data content and API’s. More on all that soon…

If you managed to read all the way to here, then my thanks for your attention, I hope that was informative and useful reading.

I’ve dropped the link a few times already but we really do value your thoughts and input so please do feel free to drop us a line here with any requests or insights.

Thanks!

Dan Seal

Chief Product Officer, Macrobond.

Macrobond application 1.30.112 maintenance release

This update contains fixes and tweaks.

You can begin installation directly from within the application. Either by clicking on the yellow banner that appears in the application, or by going to Help|Check for update in the menu of the Macrobond application.

If updating requires involvement from your IT department, please see the instructions provided here.

If you have asked us to contact your IT department directly for these upgrades, an email with information about upgrading to the latest version will be sent to your IT contact person. You are always welcome to contact the Macrobond team if you have any questions.

Macrobond application 1.30.109 maintenance release

This update contains fixes and tweaks.

If updating requires involvement from your IT department, please see the instructions provided here.

Macrobond application 1.30.107 maintenance release

This update contains fixes and tweaks.

If updating requires involvement from your IT department, please see the instructions provided here.

Release 3: Feeds and Integrations

Feed Services

Databricks Integration

Databricks is an ecosystem where users can analyse data, and build data products in an agnostic cloud-hosted environment. Databricks is also renowned for the analytics and AI tools they provide.

The specific area we are focusing on here is the Databricks Marketplace.

Macrobond customers can now ask to receive their bespoke data feed directly into Databricks.

The main advantage of doing so is to offer an additional way of consuming the data via the Macrobond Data web API or FTP service for instance, and reduce the ETL ('Extract, Transform, and Load'). Macrobond data would be readily available for consumption directly into the customers' Databricks instance.

The publicly available Macrobond Pay-As-You-Go data feed on Databricks is available here.

Key highlights:

- Reduced ETL

- Bespoke data feed

- Minimum latency

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Content

Macrobond ONE: Now-Casting Economics

The term now-casting is a contraction for now and forecasting and it is defined as the prediction of the present, the very near future and the very recent past. Now-casting is relevant in economics because key statistics on the present state of the economy are available with a significant delay. This is particularly true for those collected on a quarterly basis, with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) being a prominent example.

Now-Casting Economics delivers frequently updated near term predictions of key macroeconomic variables. These predictions are generated by a set of statistical models, which run continuously on the Now-casting’s proprietary platform. As soon as a new value for any of the input data series is published, the relevant Now-Casting models process the new information and update their predictions.

The dataset currently covers 33 countries, additional key macroeconomic statistics which include proprietary indices such as the Now-Casting Surprise Index.

Data navigation improvements

1. From International to National Source

Some sources are both international and national sources. When we treat these sources as international only, users can only find the data within Source & Release.

We will now treat the below sources as national sources, so that we can expose structure within Country & Region, allowing users to navigate thematically within the tree to find the concepts they are after. First release includes ECB and Eurostat.

2. US Labor Market

Some of the steps involve:

• Removing discontinued nodes

• Moving wages & earnings from Labor Market to Income & Earnings

• Taxonomy harmonization e.g. ‘underemployment’

• Deeper tree-nodes to denote better specific concepts

3. Customer-driven fixes, involving custom tree creation to ensure thematic navigation (after) vs. flat or no hierarchy (before)

Including, but not limited to:

• US Dallas Fed Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey

• US Retail Trade

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Revision History expansion

Users will now be able to benefit from Revision History (access to vintages and associated time stamps) on International sources.

We are turning the feature on for Eurostat first; ECB will be next.

As a reminder, in the last delivery cycle, we also turned on Revision History for daily time series to capture the vintageTimeStamps, to be used as publication dates.

Facilitating cross-regional comparison - International & Subnational RegionKeys

1. International sources’ RegionKeys

RegionKeys allow users to change the region of analysis in their documents, or to link together similar time series programmatically, around a unique concept.

We are starting with Eurostat and will prioritize expansion based on customer requirements.

2. US subnational RegionKeys

Macrobond will now allow users to flip the Region being analysed at the sub-regional level e.g. state, MSA, city etc.

This enhancement covers 132 releases in the US

3. Chinese subnational RegionKeys

Similar to above, this enhancement covers 56 releases in China.

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Macrobond 1.30

Enhanced data exploration workflow

The new “Quick views” provides superior dataset exploration. You can now select ready-made templates combining charts and tables in one screen, via the mouse or through keyboard shortcuts.

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With a time series selected, the Presentation Actions box now allows for several operations to open up pre-defined templates in a “Quick View” tab:

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A screenshot of a computerDescription automatically generated

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By popular request, this Quick View tab includes the option to open a chart and table in the same view:

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And, even more conveniently, these functions can be assigned keyboard shortcuts in the Quick View settings:

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Control the graph size to fit to your publication requirements

We’ve made several changes to give you more flexibility to control the size of the graph area, making it easier to prepare charts for publication purposes.

The main feature now available to you is the “Uniform pane size” setting. This will make all panes in a chart the same size, regardless of how many panes you use, and the size of titles and footers.

This is available in the settings for the Graph area (also in Style sheets) as well as in the Graph layout dialog.

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Additionally, you now have full control over margin indentations from top, left, right, and bottom under Properties for Chart.

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Margin controls now make it possible for you to control the positioning of the edge of the chart, regardless of the size and position of other elements like titles.

These two features combined empower you to control the spatial formatting of your charts like never before.

Additional ways to analyse rates and % data

You can now choose to use additive rebase in slice analytics. Each value of the timeseries in the underlying segment will be subtracted with the first value of the segment minus the value you input. This is particularly useful when you want to have result of each segment starting at 0.

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Improved readability for charts with multiple panes

You can now choose to display the legend text per chart pane, so that each chart pane will have a floating legend text flagging series displayed in their corresponding pane.

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A graph of stock marketDescription automatically generated

Making bar charts more readable

Now the column headers and footers will wrap the text for column width adjustment without having to hard code the line break in the text box.

Backfill history using discontinued series

Macrobond may be required to create a new time series with a recent historical start point if there is a change made to the methodology of the time series or any other change.

Users seeking to extend the historical data of their time series can now easily locate related discontinued time series by right-clicking within the contextual menu. This functionality allows for seamless addition of these series to documents, enabling the extension of historical context for the main time series they are using.

Other use cases than backfilling history can be achieved using this feature.
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Support for Chinese language

The general release of the application version in Chinese is now available to all users running v1.29 and above.

You can now opt for Macrobond in Chinese by changing your database language in your application settings:

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If your application version does not allow you to switch the database language yourself, ask your Macrobond representative to activate the Chinese application for you.

The tree structure and time series descriptions are now available in Chinese:

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Macrobond application 1.29.115 maintenance release

This update contains fixes and tweaks.

If updating requires involvement from your IT department, please see the instructions provided here.

Who ‘MOVE’d My Cheese?

Embracing Change in Bond Markets.

Meghna Shah
Macro Strategist & Chief Economist
Macrobond

All opinions expressed in this content are those of the contributor(s) and do not reflect the views of Macrobond Financial AB. All written and electronic communication from Macrobond Financial AB is for information or marketing purposes and does not qualify as substantive research.

In Spencer Johnson’s classic, “Who Moved My Cheese?”, the theme is simple yet profound: “Change is inevitable, and adapting is essential”. This concept resonates deeply with the bond markets today, where volatility has surged due to a confluence of geopolitical, fiscal and monetary factors. October was particularly eventful, marked by a sharp rise in bond yields as investors faced heightened uncertainties from key political and policy outcomes scheduled this week. The U.S. 10-year Treasury yields spiked by 50 basis points, with other developed market (DM) bond yields following a similar path. While equities in developed markets consolidated, bond markets reacted, with pronounced sell-offs in major DM bond indices.

Build-Up to the Election and the volatility

Since Harris’s nomination in July, bond markets have reflected the “Trump trade” in the lead-up to the election, with yields and the dollar index closely following betting prices of a Trump victory.

1. USD Dollar

The dollar index echoed strength, resembling the dollar rally that followed Trump’s 2016 win. ‍

2. Treasury Yields

Yields have climbed, largely due to concerns over worsening fiscal health and inflation risks. Factors such as potential tariff impositions, retaliatory measures, proposed tax cuts to boost consumer sentiment, and an outlook for expansive government spending are all fuelling these expectations.

Recent yield trends suggest that the market’s anticipation of limited fiscal restraint and persistence of inflationary risks, are getting priced in to some extent, regardless of who wins the presidency.

October’s yield surge: Disseminating the MOVE Index Spike 

The October 2024 data from the MOVE index, which tracks bond market volatility, reveals a significant increase in volatility compared to last year. When regressed against the 10-year yield, October 2024 data points lie above the trend line as well as above October 2023 levels. In October 2023, the U.S. 10-year yield touched 5%, reflecting widespread acceptance of the “higher for longer” interest rate narrative—a shift that became the new norm. This recent spike in market volatility and the yield movement suggest, investors are navigating an environment of heightened uncertainty led by numerous drivers.

Decoding Yield Components: Short-Term Rate Expectations and Term Premium

To understand yield volatility and trends, yields can be decomposed into: ‍

1. Short-Term Rate Expectations

This reflects market expectations for near-term policy rates, which are largely aligned with central bank policy rate and anticipated rate adjustments. ‍

2. Term Premium

This is the additional return investors demand to hold longer-term bonds, compensating for risks related to credit, liquidity, interest rates and other factors associated with holding duration. The term premium is especially sensitive to economic uncertainty, amplifying yield volatility as investors adjust their risk assessments.

Assessing Short term rate expectations

Monetary policy expectations continue to evolve, remaining closely tied to the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate of stable prices and maximum employment. So far, the Fed has managed a “soft landing,” keeping the U.S. out of recession. However, recent data—such as consumer spending, employment figures, and ISM indexes—show signs of slowing momentum.

Adding to this outlook, many proposed policy agendas from the presidential candidates carry potential inflationary risks. When regressed over the last years, regardless of political and policy changes, U.S. inflation (CPI) has on average trailed M2 money supply growth by about 24 months. The Fed’s restrictive monetary policy and rate hikes since 2022 have successfully curbed inflation this year. However, M2 growth, which dropped to -2.2% in January 2024, has since rebounded to 2.6% by September 2024. This resurgence in M2 growth could sustain upward price pressures, with inflation potentially rising again after a lag.

Core CPI could likely stay elevated, remaining above the Fed’s 2% target, which could keep the base yield curve higher and maintain wider yield-inflation differentials. Historically, similar wide differentials have occurred during periods of strong growth and policy adjustments, such as the robust growth phase of 2006-2007, expectations of policy tightening around 2010, the "taper tantrum" in 2013, and the Fed’s balance sheet reduction in 2018.

The scope for monetary policy adjustments depends on reaching a neutral rate (r*) that supports trend growth while closing the output gap to achieve target inflation levels. According to the HLW estimate, the output gap stood at a positive 0.1% for Q3 2024. In pursuit of a soft landing and with evolving growth inflation risks, markets have recalibrated expectations for monetary easing in H2 2024 and 2025.

Assessing Term premium sensitivities

The recent month-over-month yield spike of over 50 basis points reflects a notable increase in the term premium investors demand. In addition to the marginal increment in short term rate expectations, both the ACM and KW models from the Federal Reserve indicate a rise in term premium. This has stemmed from heightened debt levels, which challenge the market’s capacity to absorb supply and from policy uncertainty as investors struggle to assess shifting macroeconomic dynamics.

The increase in the underlying term premium and the associated volatility is driven by pricing risks linked to a wide range of uncertainties. These range from broader risks like a potential sovereign debt crisis to more niche indices tracking as ‘entitlement programs’ and ‘national security’.

Additionally, the Economic Policy Uncertainty index has shown significant widening in its components, particularly in "Trade Policy" (203.6) and "Fiscal Policy" (127.8). These trends largely reflect the growing bets on a Trump victory throughout much of October.

Directionally, the term premium tends to remain sticky for a quarter until greater clarity emerges on the underlying sources of uncertainty (structural measures/policy response). At present, the outcomes of the upcoming election, particularly with respect to the control of the House and Senate, will be crucial for the implementation of proposed agendas and their potential impact on yields. A Red sweep can further portend higher term premium with trade escalations as seen in the chart above.

Bond market embracing change: Higher term premium, higher volatility

Markets are currently pricing in a bear steepening of the yield curve, driven by expectations of calibrated monetary policy easing that affects the shorter end, while concerns over above-target inflation and increased debt supply weigh on the longer end. However, the backdrop of this political and policy transition is characterized by entrenched persistence of higher term premium and increased volatility, emanating from the multiple uncertainties and their correlated outcomes.

Macrobond application 1.29.113 maintenance release

This update contains fixes and tweaks.

If updating requires involvement from your IT department, please see the instructions provided here.

Macrobond application 1.29.110 maintenance release

This update contains fixes and tweaks.

If updating requires involvement from your IT department, please see the instructions provided here.