Methodology

Sources and cadence

• Prices, hourly charts and daily closes come from Yahoo Finance. The board refreshes every five minutes; hourly chart series refresh when their contents change; daily closes are rebuilt each night at 00:10 UTC over a rolling 120-day window.
• Written summaries, market reads, themes and the Alpha Brief are generated by Google's Gemini models from the day's measured data. They are not reviewed by a person before they appear, and they can be wrong.
• Prices may be delayed and are not guaranteed accurate. Futures are the front contract; spot and futures prices for the same commodity differ.

Every page renders its figures on the server, so what a crawler reads is exactly what a visitor sees. The board's timestamp says when the pipeline last ran; it does not say whether a particular instrument's market is open. A market that is closed shows its last quote with an explicit label.

Unknown is not zero

Where a figure cannot be measured — a market is closed, an instrument is too new, a series is missing — it is shown as "no data" and left out of every ranking, average and count that depends on it. It is never shown as 0% or ranked as a flat day, because a zero asserts a calm market that nobody measured.

The 24-hour move

change24h is the percentage change over the trailing 24 hours, measured within one venue's own series. Direction uses a ±0.05% deadband: inside it a move is shown as flat. The 24-hour high and low are taken from hourly closes, so they are not the true intraday extremes. Range position is where the price sits between that low (0%) and high (100%).

Every move carries a ▲ or ▼ glyph and a signed number as well as a colour, so direction never depends on colour alone.

Volatility (sigma20)

sigma20 is the sample standard deviation of an instrument's last 20 daily returns, in percent — the size of move it makes on an ordinary day. Returns are measured across non-trading days: Friday to Monday is one return, not three. A missing day is left missing; it is never filled with the previous close, because doing so to every weekend would understate a currency's volatility by roughly 40%. With fewer than 15 returns, or a volatility of exactly zero (a pegged currency), no figure is published.

"Vol vs baseline" compares today's hourly volatility with the instrument's own exponentially weighted average, which has a memory of about three days. It is only shown once the baseline has at least twelve samples.

Surprise

surprise is the 24-hour move divided by the instrument's own 20-day volatility, signed, in standard deviations (σ). It is the one figure on the site that compares instruments with each other: 0.4% in USD/JPY against a 0.16%-a-day habit is +2.5σ, while 2% in Bitcoin against a 2%-a-day habit is +1.0σ. Those two readings mean the same thing, which no pair of percentages does.

Two limits travel with every surprise reading. Its numerator is a trailing 24 hours while its denominator is close-to-close over whole days, so mid-session the reading runs slightly tame. And the volatility comes from the same third-party closes as the move itself.

Phrases such as "the kind of session it has roughly once a month" convert a reading into a frequency using a normal distribution. Real market returns have fatter tails than a normal distribution, so large days happen more often than these phrases imply.

Momentum lenses

Each momentum page ranks a fixed population — currencies, metals, crypto, commodities, the headline "majors", the whole board, or the whole board by surprise. Membership is defined by asset class rather than a hand-kept list. Ranked across the whole board by percentage, a currency pair would almost never appear, because exotic pairs and coins out-move the majors on nearly every day; ranking within a class keeps the comparison like-for-like.

Currency strength

For each currency pair the base currency takes the pair's 24-hour move and the quote currency its negative. A currency's strength is the unweighted mean of its contributions. It is not a trade-weighted index: coverage is uneven, so the number of pairs is shown with every reading.

Sessions

The day is divided into three contiguous UTC blocks — Asia 22:00–07:00, London 07:00–13:00, New York 13:00–22:00 — so each hour is counted exactly once. Each hourly step is attributed to the block its later candle falls in, and the steps are summed as log returns, so the three session figures compose exactly to the day's move. These are price moves only; they say nothing about volume.

Correlations

Correlations are Pearson correlations of daily returns over the last 60 sessions that both instruments traded — never of price levels, and never across a day only one of them traded. At least 30 paired returns are required. "Relationships that have changed" compares the 60 sessions before the last 20 with the last 20; the windows are adjacent, not nested, so a recent break cannot contaminate its own baseline. Correlation is not causation and not a hedge ratio.

Heat map

Each cell is the unweighted average return of the instruments in a class or group, over 24 hours (live) or 5, 21 and 63 trading sessions (from daily closes). It is not an index. The number of instruments behind each cell is shown, and tints are relative to the largest reading on the same grid.

Risk dial and market stress

The risk dial combines equity indices, major crypto, copper, the VIX, gold, the US Dollar Index and the strength of the yen, franc, Australian and New Zealand dollars. Weights are inverse to each input's typical daily range. The sum is passed through a hyperbolic tangent to give 0–100; 65 and above reads risk-on, 35 and below risk-off. Market stress is the share of instruments with a volatility figure whose move is beyond ±2σ; about 5% would be expected on an ordinary day.

What Kinzan does not do

Kinzan describes what markets have done. It does not forecast, recommend or advise, and nothing on it is an offer to buy or sell anything. See the disclaimer.