So Many Signals. So Little Rigorous Analysis

So, we might be on the cusp of an interesting August in the financial world. Four very different yellow flags are flashing:

• Alf Peccatiello says the Treasury is about to refill its cash account in a way that could drain hundreds of billions from bank reserves. The plumbing of the financial system. If history rhymes, that can make markets feel suddenly “tighter” even without a rate hike. Here is Alf’s latest. I should point out, Alf has done extraordinary work pointing out how "liquidity" does not directly affect asset prices, but it is a force worth tracking.
• Eric Basmajian’s cyclical jobs basket just flipped negative. These aren’t the headline payrolls. They’re the construction and manufacturing jobs that usually turn down first when the economy slows. My previous note on why that matters.
• Tom McClellan shows that while the Nasdaq-100 is at highs, fewer of its members are participating. The “Mag 7” are carrying the index while most stocks have quietly left the party. A classic "bad-breadth" divergence. Tom’s latest.
• John Hussman reminds us valuations are at their most extreme in decades (MarketCap/GVA), which doesn’t time markets, but makes the downside math nastier when something breaks. To paraphrase him, a crash is when risk meets a market not priced for risk. Hussman’s last update.
• Mike Green, for now, is not sounding the alarms just yet in his latest (private) note, suggesting passive flows may still be buying in the background.

Plenty of compelling signals from credible sources. But this is where most financial commentary stops. Everyone has their preferred metric, and the rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

What’s missing is rigorous analysis of what actually ends up mattering when these appear together. That’s where Alethia aims to focus: not “ooh, scary signal,” but the hard question – has this mattered historically, and in what context?

I don’t yet know which of these is most important. But we can start asking the right questions, build even simple models, and test them. A basic logistic regression, trained and back-tested, could already tell us which signals historically carried the most weight and which were noise.

This isn’t about fortune-telling or feeding confirmation bias. It’s about building a habit of truth-seeking and observability in markets, and finding out what really drives them. That kind of analysis barely exists in financial news today, and it’s the gap Alethia is being built to fill.