Glossary
Glossary
Definitions as this site uses them — not a claim to own the language.
- Consumer confidence
- A survey composite of how households rate current conditions and near-term expectations. It is not observed spending.
- Consumer sentiment
- Often used interchangeably with confidence, but tied to specific questionnaires such as the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers.
- Current conditions
- The leg of a confidence index that asks how finances and business conditions feel now, not next year.
- Expectations
- Forward-looking survey items. They move with news, politics, asset prices, and imagined policy — not only with paystubs.
- Nowcast
- An estimate of a series for the current period before the official print arrives. It is a model, not a fact.
- Z-score
- How many standard deviations a print sits from its own recent history. Useful for comparing series on different native scales.
- Revision flag
- A marker that a stored value later changed — preliminary versus final, or a restated weight. Signals without this lie to backtests.
- Purchase intent
- Survey or search evidence that a household plans to buy a category (cars, durables, trips) in a stated window.
- Lock-in
- Owners staying put because their existing mortgage rate is far below current offers, shrinking listings.
- Sentiment-spending gap
- When surveys look weak while nominal sales look firm, often because of prices, mix, or income composition.
- Sector tape
- CrowdMood’s category indices (retail, housing, autos, travel, staples, tech, energy bills, labor) rather than one global print.
- Educational composite
- The public dashboard number. Documented, lagged, and not a replacement for a national statistical office.
- CrowdMood Trident
- The desk’s named long/short overlay on Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, WTI, gold, and euro FX futures. Public output is stance (long, short, stand), age since the last turn, a dated price chart, and a sample track versus buy-and-hold.
- Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR)
- U.S. government crude stored mainly in Gulf Coast salt caverns. A release moves barrels into nearby refining and shipping pipes; it is not by itself a rewrite of global geology.
- Strait of Hormuz
- The maritime front door for most Persian Gulf crude and product exports. Throughput, freight, and war-risk cover matter more than a minister’s map.
- Petroline (East-West pipeline)
- Saudi Arabia’s land bridge from eastern fields toward the Red Sea port of Yanbu. A Hormuz bypass with limited loading capacity — not a full substitute for the strait.
- Bab el-Mandeb
- The southern gate of the Red Sea. Asia-bound cargoes that leave Yanbu still have to clear it after a Petroline reroute.
- Backwardation / contango
- Near futures above later ones (backwardation) usually means prompt barrels are scarce. Near futures below later ones (contango) usually means storage pays.
- War-risk premium
- Extra hull insurance for sailing a dangerous door. When it jumps while the futures print barely moves, the paper market is late.
- 10-year real yield
- What a 10-year TIPS pays after inflation. The clean opportunity cost of holding gold, which pays no coupon.
- Breakeven inflation
- Nominal 10-year yield minus 10-year TIPS yield. The bond market’s implied average inflation over the decade.
- Diesel crack / distillate crack
- Wholesale diesel or heating-oil price minus crude. A wide crack with thin distillate stocks means the product end of the barrel is scarce, not only the crude print.
- Distillate inventories
- Stocks of diesel and heating oil. In the U.S., read the national EIA total and PADD 1 (East Coast) separately.
- Teapot refiners
- China’s independent refiners, many in Shandong, that buy under non-state crude import quotas. A valve on seaborne demand — not younger geology.