About & methodology

01 · What it is

A live cross-asset desk, written by rules

ZeroFluxx is an independent, single-page desk that pulls a live market tape and the headline flow across macro, US politics, AI and emerging tech, ranks it, and turns it into a plain-English read. Everything on the page is regenerated every two minutes by a deterministic pipeline: there is no editorial team, no language model writing the copy, no accounts and no tracking.

The point is not to replace a news site. It is to answer, in one glance, what is moving, why, and what to watch next — and to be honest about how confident that answer is.

02 · The tape

Where the numbers come from

• Quotes come from Yahoo Finance chart data (an unofficial, public endpoint). The market cards use 1-minute intraday bars; the watchlist and sector board use daily bars. WTI crude has a Stooq fallback.
• Change is always measured against the prior session's close, so the ticker, market cards and watchlist agree with each other. When markets are closed you see the last session's move.
• Sparklines are drawn from the same data at three ranges: 1H, 1D and 1W.
• Quote measurement periods come from the exchange metadata on each quote (instrument type and the current trading period), not from a single site-wide clock. Equity and index changes freeze at their exchange's close; futures and crypto keep updating. The page states which applies beside every figure rather than labelling them all “today”.
• Sector rotation ranks the eleven SPDR sector ETFs (XLK, XLF, XLE, XLV, XLI, XLC, XLRE, XLP, XLU, XLB, XLY) by the day's move and counts advancers versus decliners.
• The watchlist draws from a fixed universe of index, volatility, mega-cap and ETF names — the symbols the desk already fetches quotes for, which is why the picker searches that list rather than the whole market. Starter lists (Macro, AI & Semis, Broad Markets) fill it in one click, and rows reorder by drag or by the arrow buttons and Alt+Arrow keys. Your order and sort mode are saved in your own browser and never leave it.

Some venues' data may be delayed by up to 15 minutes; crypto and futures trade around the clock, index and equity quotes do not.

03 · Headlines & ranking

Where the headlines come from — and how they are ranked

Each lane is assembled from a Google News search (US edition, last 24 hours) plus direct publisher feeds. Nothing is scraped from article pages; every card links to the original publisher.

The score

Every headline gets an importance score from 1 to 10. It is a sum of fixed signals, not a model:

• Credibility tier of the outlet. Reuters, Bloomberg, the WSJ, the FT and AP sit at the top; national broadcasters and papers next; content farms, PR wires, broker blogs and stock-tip mills are penalised. An outlet the desk does not recognise gets a small penalty rather than the benefit of the doubt.
• Recency. Under an hour old earns the biggest bonus; anything past 12 hours is penalised and past 48 hours penalised hard. Each lane prefers the last 48 hours and only reaches further back rather than run empty.
• Market-moving language — the Fed, CPI, payrolls, tariffs, sanctions, earnings, recession, "breaking" — and lane-specific terms (executive orders and the Supreme Court in politics; chips, robotaxis and launches in tech).
• Corroboration. A story carried by two distinct outlets gets +1, by three or more +2 (see below).
• Soft penalties for opinion, analysis, previews, commentary and "what it means" pieces; hard rejections for press-release wires, listicles and clickbait patterns, SEO-farm formatting, off-topic lifestyle content, and local-government or police press releases masquerading as tech news.

Lanes are then mixed for source diversity (no single feed can flood a lane) and Tech is de-duplicated against AI so the same story does not appear twice. Because the raw score is an open-ended sum, the 1–10 number shown is a calibrated curve over it: most headlines land between 4 and 8 and a 10 is rare by design. Read it as a tier, not a precise ordering.

04 · Corroboration

"Also seen from …"

Different outlets write different headlines for the same story. The desk clusters them by comparing the meaningful words of each headline (publisher names stripped, plurals folded, stopwords removed) and merges two headlines when they share at least three of those words with strong overlap. The best-scoring version is shown as the card; the others appear beneath it as related headlines, and the outlet list is shown as Also seen from.

Only distinct outlets count. An article and its video version, or the same publisher reaching the desk through two feeds, collapse into one card but do not corroborate each other. On quiet days most stories legitimately have a single source; the count rises on big news days, which is exactly when it is useful.

05 · The synthesis layer

Regime, the briefing and the rest

Regime

A single cross-asset score summarises the tape, using the day's percentage moves:

The regime is Risk On at +1.4 or above and Risk Off at −1.4 or below, otherwise Mixed. It uses hysteresis: once a regime is entered it is held until the score retreats past ±1.0, so the label cannot flip back and forth while the score hovers on a threshold. Every leg is symmetric — a softening dollar or easing crude counts as a risk-on signal, not merely a neutral one — and the S&P is counted once, at double weight. The drivers listed next to it (“equities bid”, “dollar firming”, “crypto risk fading”) are the individual legs that crossed their own thresholds. The regime trail records a new point only when the label changes or the score moves by 1.2 or more, and keeps the last six.

Market in 30 seconds

The briefing at the top of the page is assembled from templates fed by the current regime, the sector board, the top movers, the lead headline and cross-desk themes. It states what moved, the lead development (with its source, impact, relevance score and age) and what to watch next. It is written by rules, not by an AI model, so it is consistent and fast — and occasionally stiff. It is labelled Automated summary wherever it appears.

Top story & catalysts

The top story is the highest-scoring market headline, with a one-line "why it matters". Each market card also names the headline that best explains its move, with a confidence label that reflects how well the headline's terms match the asset — Low confidence means the desk is guessing.

Right Now and refresh notes

Each refresh is compared with the previous one: the biggest mover, the newest headline, the highest-impact item and any regime change. "No major shift since the last refresh" is a real result, not a placeholder.

Calendar

A curated list of scheduled US macro events (jobs report, CPI, PPI, retail sales, FOMC meetings and minutes) within the next 45 days. Only genuinely scheduled events appear — when nothing is due, the Today column says so rather than filling the space with headlines.

06 · Freshness & feed health

How you can tell it is actually live

• The header shows the time of the last refresh and a countdown to the next one.
• Every headline carries its published time ("14m ago", "3h ago") computed from the publisher's own timestamp. If a feed provides no date, no time is shown — the desk never labels something "latest" that it cannot date.
• Every refresh records the status of each feed. The Sources panel above the tape shows how many are responding and when they were checked; open it for a per-feed list with item counts and any errors. A dead feed thins a lane instead of silently breaking the page.
• The market footer also shows how many quotes are live and how old they are.

07 · Glossary

Terms used on the desk

Tape

The running set of live prices — the ticker across the top plus the market cards and watchlist.

Regime

The cross-asset risk read: Risk On, Risk Off or Mixed, from the score above.

Market in 30 seconds

The briefing at the top: what moved, the lead development and what to watch next.

Relevance / Impact

The rules-based 1–10 headline score and its tier (High 8+, Medium 5–7, Low). It is a relevance score, not an editorial judgement.

Also seen from

Other distinct outlets carrying the same story (corroboration).

Catalyst

The headline the desk thinks best explains an asset's move, with a confidence label.

Right Now

The biggest move among the eight macro indicators, the newest headline that clears the prominence bar, and the current regime. It is not a five-minute change.

Measurement period

The window a change figure covers. It is not the same for every asset, so each quote states its own: regular session while a US equity session is open; at the <time> close once it has ended, at which point the figure stops moving (VIX closes 3:15pm CT, not 4:00pm ET); since prior settlement for futures (WTI, Brent), which keep trading; since 00:00 UTC for crypto — a UTC-day change, not a rolling 24 hours; and since prior close for continuously traded instruments such as the ICE dollar index. Each quote also carries its own timestamp, which can be older than the page's refresh time when the market that produced it has closed.

Sector rotation

Which sector ETFs are leading and lagging today, and how broad the move is.

President Wire

Recent posts from the President's Truth Social account, surfaced alongside political headlines.

DXY

The US Dollar Index — the dollar against a basket of major currencies.

VIX

The CBOE Volatility Index — implied volatility of S&P 500 options; rising VIX usually means stress.

USOIL / Brent

WTI and Brent crude oil futures, the two benchmark oil prices.

SPY / SPX

The S&P 500 ETF and the index itself.

09 · Privacy

No accounts, no analytics

• There is no sign-up, no analytics script, no advertising and no third-party tracking on this site.
• Your watchlist order, sort mode and alert preset are stored in your browser's local storage so they survive a reload. They are never sent anywhere.
• The site can be installed as an app; a service worker caches the page shell so it opens offline with the last data you loaded.
• Links to headlines go to the publisher. Headlines found through Google News pass through a Google redirect on the way.