AXIOMA ROOF™ SCORE HIGHLIGHTS

Markets run on disagreement. Every trade needs a buyer and a seller, each quietly convinced the other has it wrong; a market where nobody argues has very little to say for itself. The real story in this week's sentiment data is the agreement: cross-market dispersion, the measure of how differently investors are positioned across the ten markets we track, has collapsed from the 62nd percentile of its history a month ago to the 1st today, and has sat there all week. The ten local conversations that usually make up our investment universe have merged into one.

The subject is easy to reconstruct from the past month's two exhibits. The first is the US-Iran standoff, where efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz keep diplomats busy without yet making them successful. The second is the bond market, where surging government yields have put a price back on capital that many portfolios had been renting for free. One clouds future cash flows while the other raises the rate used to discount them, and over the past month the pair has hardened into a ceiling on risk appetite almost everywhere.

The ceiling shows in where the month's journeys ended. Sentiment in five of the ten read negative or bearish a month ago; today only China reads negative, at -0.30 despite a material improvement, and none reads bearish. Yet the exits from pessimism all led to the middle: the count of positive readings is unchanged at four over the month, while neutral has gone from one market to five. Sentiment among US investors improved by 0.81 over the month to +0.40, the strongest reading in our investment universe; among Japanese investors it recovered by 0.75 and still only reached a neutral +0.15. Even the dissenters obeyed it: risk appetite among UK and EM investors deteriorated over the month and still landed in the same neutral band. The aggregate, at +0.14, is neutral and little changed over the past week. A month of movement, and every path ended under the same ceiling, pressed down by the same two hands: stalled diplomacy and expensive capital.

The 1st percentile keeps a short visitors' list. Dispersion visited twice in the past eighteen months, in May and October of 2025, each time for a single day. The last stay of a full week was 2020, which managed it three times, beginning in late January as a novel coronavirus introduced itself to the world's risk models. Today's reading is itself a single observation, in compressed territory only since 23 September, so honesty points to the touches rather than the pandemic. The speed is harder to dismiss: a fall of almost 62 percentile points in thirty days has happened in fewer than 5% of all thirty-day windows since 1997. Precedent describes the company a number keeps rather than the road ahead. Agreement on this scale has historically required a crisis nobody could look away from; investors have now produced it with two.

When investors in all ten markets take their cue from the same two variables, diversification goes quietly on leave: a surprise in the Gulf or the bond market would be repriced everywhere at once. Neutral sentiment carries no bias either way: undecided investors take their direction from the next headline, and they would take it together. A crowd gathered in the middle holds neither the optimist's habit of forgiving bad news nor the pessimist's comfort of having already priced it.

FOMC minutes, ISM Services and preliminary Michigan consumer sentiment in the US; factory orders and trade data in Germany, producer prices in the Eurozone, consumer confidence and machine tool orders in Japan — a calendar generous enough to send every investor home with better reasons for the views they brought in. None of it moves the ceiling: that would take progress in the Gulf or calm in the bond market, and neither is scheduled. The candidate third hand, the US midterm stretch now fully open, would press through the bond market's fiscal arithmetic; sentiment among US investors, still the strongest of the ten, says it hovers. Watch the dispersion series itself, then. From the 1st percentile there is only one direction left, and the manner of the widening will be the diagnosis: all ten markets re-differentiating as a hand relaxes means the ceiling is lifting, a first bullish reading confirming it, while the US alone leaving the pack by heading down means the third hand has landed. Unanimity has one reliable flaw: it leaves nobody on the other side of the trade.

Aggregate ROOF Trend: The black line is the aggregate mean of ROOF scores across the ten markets; the shaded grey band shows the range from the most bearish to the most bullish market on each day, indicating the dispersion of sentiment across the universe. Reading it: a rising line indicates increasing risk tolerance; a declining line indicates increasing risk aversion. 

Bottom strip: cross-market dispersion percentile — the cross-sectional standard deviation of ROOF across the ten markets, percentile-ranked against its own full history. Shaded zones mark elevated (>80th percentile) and compressed (<20th) readings. Reading it: a spike into the top shaded zone is a material divergence episode (sentiment moving in different directions across markets), a slide into the bottom shaded zone is a material convergence episode on a common driver (sentiment moving in the same direction across markets).

Regime Distribution: Three horizontal stacked bars show how the ten markets are distributed across the five regimes — today, one week ago, and one month ago. Each bar is colored by regime: red (Bearish), yellow (Negative), grey (Neutral), blue (Positive), green (Bullish). The white vertical marker on each bar shows the aggregate ROOF score for that period. Tick marks below the bars align with the regime thresholds at ±0.20 and ±0.50. Reading it: a leftward shift over time indicates broadening deterioration; a rightward shift indicates broadening improvement. Widening tails signal rising dispersion.

Market Monitor: A table showing, for each market: current ROOF score, current regime, weekly and monthly changes, regime one month ago, and distance to the nearest extreme threshold. Color cues highlight regime deteriorations (red) and improvements (green). Reading it: scan the "1M Ago Regime" column for markets that have crossed regime bands over the past month; check the "Distance" column to find markets close to the ±0.50 extreme thresholds.

Correlation Matrix (Δ1M): A heatmap of correlations between monthly sentiment changes across all market pairs, over a rolling 60-day window. Green cells indicate that investor sentiment in the two markets changed in the same direction; red cells indicate opposite directions. The rightmost column shows each market's average correlation with the rest of the universe. Important: these are correlations of sentiment changes, not market returns or ROOF levels. High correlation means investor mood in the two markets moved in sync over the past 60 days.