There is a television in the café at work that is always on CNBC, muted, and for a long time I could not read it. Numbers in green and red, words like death cross and inverted curve, a 10-year doing something to a 30-year. I am supposed to be good with numbers. I decided to learn what the screen was actually saying.
A screen I could not read
What is on it is three things stacked. A strip of interest rates. A board of stock indexes. And a crawl of words along the bottom that sound ominous on purpose. None of it is hard. It is just never explained, because the people who build these screens assume you already know.
So here is the decoder I built while I figured it out. Everything below is interactive. The numbers are illustrative shapes, not live quotes, because the point is the grammar, not today’s close.
What the numbers are
The rate strip is the simplest place to begin. Every line on it is a loan to the U.S. government, and the number before the “yr” is just how long until you are paid back. A yield is the yearly percent that loan pays.
Glossary
The crawl, decoded
10-year Treasury yield
What it costs the U.S. government to borrow for ten years, as a yearly percent. The whole economy is priced off it: mortgages, car loans and corporate debt all sit a little above it.
Tap a chip. Same idea as the strip crawling along the bottom of the café screen, except each one explains itself.
The shape everyone watches
Line those yields up by how long they run, shortest to longest, and you get the yield curve. Normally it slopes up: you demand more to lock your money away for thirty years than for two. When it flips and slopes down, the market is saying something is coming. It is the single most-watched shape in finance.
Interactive
Bend the yield curve
2s10s spread
+0.50%
Longer loans pay more, so the line climbs. The market is pricing steady growth. This is the resting state.
Illustrative curve shapes, not live quotes. Spread = 10-year yield minus 2-year yield.
Three kinds of moving
Here is the thing that quietly confused me longest: the green and the red are not one meter. Stocks move in percent. Yields move in basis points. And a bond’s price moves the opposite way from its yield, which is the part that trips everyone. Watch one small move travel across all three.
Interactive
One move, three screens
10-year Treasury yield
the loan got pricier
4.30%
▲ +8 bps
Price of that bond
older, cheaper coupon
100.0
▼ −0.7
30-year mortgage
tracks the 10-year
6.90%
▲ +8 bps
Watch what a single eight-basis-point move does. Yields are quoted in basis points: one hundred of them make one percent. Stocks, on the other screen, move in whole percent. Different meters, same wall.
What the indexes are
The other screen is the board of indexes, and they are not one market sliced four ways. Each holds different companies and weighs them differently, so on the same afternoon they can disagree. When they disagree, that gap tells you how broad the move really is.
Interactive
The index board
Green top to bottom, with small caps leading. Broad participation, the stronger kind of up day. Tap any index to see what is actually inside it.
Dow Jones
Why it exists
Charles Dow built it in 1896 — by hand, with no computers. No cap math meant he just added up share prices. That accident is still the weighting rule today.
What’s inside
These dominate because they have the highest share prices, not because they are the largest companies. That is the quirk.
When you see it move
'The Dow is down 300 points' sounds big but is roughly 0.75%. The S&P in percent is the cleaner read. The Dow is the public face — the number people say on the news — not the professional benchmark.
Illustrative one-day moves, not live quotes. The point is the pattern: which screens agree, and which one dissents.
What a market cap is
The index board kept saying cap-weighted, which raises the question: what is a cap? It is the simplest number on the screen, and the one people read too much into.
Reference
Reading a market cap
market cap = share price × shares outstanding
It is the price the market puts on all of a company’s stock at once: its single guess at what the whole business is worth. And that guess is really a bet on every dollar of profit the company will ever make, in today’s money. Cap is about the future, not the present.
The mega-cap club · 2024 peaks
NVDA
~$3.6T
Nvidia, AI chips
AAPL
~$3.5T
Apple, iPhone + services
MSFT
~$3.3T
Microsoft, cloud + software
What a big cap says: the market expects huge, durable profits for a long time. What it does not say: revenue, headcount, or age. A grocery chain can out-earn Nvidia on sales and be worth a fraction as much, because the cap prices in what comes next, not what just happened. The number is a moving bet, not a fact: Microsoft IPO’d at a ~$350M cap in 1986 and is past $3T now. And cap leaves out debt and cash; add those and you get enterprise value, the truer cost of buying the whole business.
The stories behind those caps, how each company actually earned the number, are the whole point of my Acquired index: the seven powers, the margins, the capital allocation across Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Berkshire, LVMH and the rest.
Tier ranges are the usual rough industry lines; caps are ~2024 peaks from the Acquired research, not live quotes.
Death cross, golden cross
The scariest words on the crawl are the simplest things. A death cross is not an event in the world. It is two lines on a chart crossing: a stock’s recent average price dropping below its longer one. Pure geometry, and a late one at that.
Interactive
When the averages cross
A death cross is the 50-day average sliding below the 200-day: recent momentum has fallen under the longer trend. The golden cross is the same move in reverse. Both are lagging, confirming a turn more than calling one.
In my own words
Now I can read it. The screen has not changed: same green and red, same ominous crawl. What changed is that it stopped being weather and started being sentences.
The 10-year is the price of the borrowing the whole country runs on. The curve is the market’s mood about the future. The scary words are mostly just two lines crossing. Now when I glance up from my laptop, I actually read it.
The same instinct, elsewhere
One number, made legible
The Big Mac as a currency yardstick. The same idea: take a scary number and make it legible.
The Big Mac Index→Why the figures are labeled
A number without its source is a rumor. Why every figure on this page says illustrative, and what it would take to make it live.
Numbers Need Sources→Sources
- The securities. U.S. TreasuryDirect: bills run under a year, notes 2 to 10 years, bonds 20 and 30. There is no 15-year Treasury; 15 and 30 are the two standard mortgage terms.
- The curve. FRED series T10Y2Y (10-year minus 2-year) and the New York Fed yield-curve model (the 3-month vs 10-year version economists favor for recession odds).
- The crosses. The death cross and golden cross are 50-day versus 200-day moving-average crossovers, lagging trend signals rather than predictive ones.