Most weekly market reviews die of ambition. Someone opens a charting platform on Sunday evening, plans to check "everything" before the open, and forty minutes later has scrolled through ninety charts, remembers three, and cannot say whether the picture actually changed. The problem is rarely discipline. It is scope. A dashboard small enough to finish in fifteen minutes is one you will still be running in November.
What follows is a method you can build this week: five indicators, free data, one spreadsheet, one recurring calendar block. No subscription, no data feed, no clever software.
Start with questions, not charts
Charts are seductive because they always say something. A yield chart can look alarming on a Tuesday and reassuring on a Thursday without anything meaningful having changed. Questions are harder to fake.
Write down four or five things you genuinely want to know each week. For a European investor watching global risk, that list usually looks like this: Is risk appetite improving or deteriorating? Are inflation pressures easing or building? Is credit getting easier or tighter? Is the domestic economy accelerating or stalling? Is positioning crowded enough that a small surprise would hurt?
Notice what those questions share. Each can be answered with a number that moves. Each has a direction that means something specific. None requires you to forecast anything, which is the point — a dashboard tells you where you are, not where you are going.
Choosing five indicators that earn their place
An indicator deserves a row on your sheet only if it passes four tests:
- It updates often enough. Weekly or monthly, on a published schedule. If you have to hunt for the release date, it will fall out of the routine.
- It is free and citable. A series with a stable code you can bookmark beats a screenshot.
- It does not duplicate another row. Two equity indices and a high-beta sector fund are one indicator wearing three hats.
- It has a direction you can state in one clause. "Widening spreads mean stress" is a rule. "It depends" is a hobby.
A workable starting five for a Europe-based reader:
- Global equities versus their long-term trend. One broad index — MSCI World, or the S&P 500 — and whether it sits above or below its 200-day moving average.
- A sovereign yield or spread. The 10-year Bund yield, or, if you follow Italian assets closely, the BTP–Bund spread. Pick one and keep it.
- A credit stress gauge. Euro high-yield spreads are the cleanest single number for how willing lenders are to take risk.
- A volatility reading. The VIX, or a European equivalent. Useful less for its level than for its direction over four weeks.
- An inflation-sensitive price. Brent crude, or a broad commodity index. It is the fastest-moving input into the inflation question.
If domestic Italy is central to your book, swap the volatility row for something from ISTAT or the Banca d'Italia — industrial production, or a business confidence measure. Keep the total at five. Four is fine. Six is the beginning of the end.
Where the free data lives
You do not need a terminal. These sources cover almost everything a weekly sheet requires, and all publish downloadable data:
- FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) — a very broad free library of macro series, with built-in charting and CSV export.
- The ECB Data Portal — euro-area rates, spreads, money and credit aggregates.
- Eurostat — harmonised inflation, unemployment and industrial output across member states.
- ISTAT — Italian inflation, GDP and confidence data, released on a published calendar.
- Banca d'Italia — Italian public finances, bank lending and the BTP–Bund spread series.
- Exchange and issuer sites — Borsa Italiana and company investor-relations pages for index and share prices.
- OECD and World Bank — longer-horizon comparative data when a weekly number needs context.
Write down the series code
This is the most underrated habit in the whole process. Next to every row, record the exact series identifier and its source. A year from now, "euro high-yield spread" will be a fog; a code is a shortcut straight back to the same data. It also stops the quiet drift where a series gets replaced with a similar-but-different one and your history stops meaning anything.
Build it in a spreadsheet, not a new tool
Seven columns are enough: indicator, latest value, value four weeks ago, value thirteen weeks ago, direction, threshold, and a short note. Freeze the header row. Add a tab per year so history accumulates without slowing the file down.
Two formatting touches do most of the work. Conditional colour on the direction column — improving, flat, deteriorating — lets you read the whole sheet in five seconds. And a rule column stating in plain words what would make you act: "If credit spreads widen four weeks running, reduce cyclical exposure." Written in advance, the rule protects you from inventing a reason to do nothing.
Keep it ugly. Dashboards that get prettified stop getting updated.
The fifteen-minute weekly routine
Pick a fixed slot — Sunday evening, Monday before the open, Friday after the close. Same time every week matters more than which time.
- Minutes 0–3: refresh. Update the five rows. Nothing else.
- Minutes 3–6: set direction. Compare with four and thirteen weeks ago, then update the colour column.
- Minutes 6–10: write three sentences. Not an essay. What changed, what didn't, what you are watching. Keep the log on its own tab so you build a searchable record.
- Minutes 10–13: scan the week ahead. Central bank meetings, inflation prints, auctions, major earnings. Note them in the same log.
- Minutes 13–15: decide one thing. Usually the decision is to do nothing, and that is a legitimate output. What matters is that the choice is deliberate.
Fifteen minutes is not a constraint on rigour; it is what keeps the review honest. There is only time for the numbers you actually chose, so you look at them rather than around them.
Three ways dashboards fail
Creep. A sixth row appears because something interesting happened. Then a seventh. Within two months the sheet takes forty minutes and gets skipped.
Drift. The thresholds were written when conditions were different and nobody revisits them. Review the rules once a quarter, and change at most one thing at a time.
No record. Without the written log, every week feels like the first one, and you cannot tell whether your read of the market has been right, wrong, or merely loud.
Your first version, this week
Start with three indicators rather than five. Choose ones you can pull from a single source in under five minutes, build the seven columns, and put a repeat fifteen-minute block in your calendar for the next four weeks. After a month, add the fourth and fifth rows — by then you will know which questions keep going unanswered.
Resist the urge to make it comprehensive. A market dashboard is not a model; it is a habit with a memory. Five numbers you look at every week will outperform fifty you look at twice, and the value compounds quietly in the log rather than in the sheet.
A dashboard is a reading tool, not investment advice. Decisions about your own portfolio are best made with a qualified professional who knows your circumstances.
Photo: Buffik / Pixabay
