Tremor tracks 18 market, credit, leverage and AI-infrastructure signals to show whether the AI trade is merely cooling—or beginning to threaten the broader market and retirement portfolios.
General crash-precursor gauges, calibrated against every ≥12% drawdown since 2004 (plus the 1990/2001/2008/2020 cycles for the curve). Ordered by measured lead: the left gauges historically move before tops; the right ones fire after — they grade severity, never timing. Known blind spots: valuation, positioning, and rate-shock bears where the curve inverts after the top (2022).
If you own an index fund or a target-date retirement fund, you're more exposed to the AI trade than you probably realize: roughly a third of the S&P 500 is seven AI-driven companies, and AI-linked stocks account for about three-quarters of the index's gains since ChatGPT launched. Meanwhile the money being spent on AI infrastructure keeps outrunning the revenue it generates: four companies committed $725 billion to the buildout in 2026 alone, up 77% in a year, and Bain estimates the industry will need $2 trillion a year by 2030 and still come up $800 billion short — while the rise of cheaper open-source models keeps sharpening the question of whether all that spending pays back. Nobody can call the top. What history does show is that unwinds follow a sequence — the weakest, most debt-dependent players crack before the flagships do. This board watches the tripwires along that sequence, in the order they historically fire.
Sources: S&P Dow Jones index data (top-10 weight; 2000–02 drawdown); Nasdaq Composite closing history (2000–2015); OpenAI compute-target and revenue figures as reported Feb 2026; Morgan Stanley / JPMorgan return-attribution analyses; Bain & Company Global Technology Report (Sept 2025). Figures as of mid-2026 and rounded; see each gauge's explainer for methodology.
Tremor does not pretend to name the exact day a bubble will burst. It watches the sequence that would show stress spreading from speculative AI infrastructure into credit, market breadth, volatility and the broader indexes held in retirement accounts.
Is the AI bubble going to pop? · Is the market crashing? · Is my 401(k) at risk? · How the AI bubble tracker works
The board above is live and always free. The Daily Brief is the morning read of it — what changed, what it means, what to do — in your inbox every trading day before the open. Below is a real one from the archive, published as-is; one representative read opens to the public each week.
See plans — founding rate $99/yr →Signals size positions; they don't time tops. Act on confirmation across categories — credit plus volatility plus breadth plus the upstream chain — never on one line alone.
Stay the plan. Keep contributing on schedule, keep the RSP/international tilt building, sell covered calls into elevated IV on mega-cap positions. This is when hedges are cheap — a good time to price collars, a bad time to panic-buy them.
Review, don't trade. Identify which category is flashing. Equity-only stress with calm credit is usually rotation. Upstream flashing first (CRWV, TSM) while NVDA holds is the pattern worth respecting — check whether credit starts confirming within two weeks. Pre-write your de-risk orders now so execution later is mechanical.
Execute the tiers. Tier 1: stop reinvesting into cap-weighted index funds; new money to T-bills. Tier 2: trim top-10 overlap (SPY/QQQ) toward equal-weight and international sleeves — tax-advantaged accounts first. Tier 3: roll covered calls to lower strikes or buy 3–6 month index puts if VIX is still under ~25. Do not liquidate wholesale — the goal is cutting concentration, not calling the exact top.
The white pin shows distance to the tripwire. Tiles are ordered by the thesis's presumed breakdown sequence — marginal buyer → supply chain → hyperscaler credit → public financing → private financing → flagship → regime confirm. How far right the red reaches is how far the cascade has progressed. Honest caveat: the sequence is thesis plus the 2000 analogy, not fitted history — in both 1999 and this cycle, credit tells fired before the equity tells, which is why three of the seven links are credit gauges.
CoreWeave is the debt-financed, single-purpose GPU landlord — no diversified cash flows to hide behind. If AI compute demand softens even slightly, it hits CRWV before NVDA's order book feels anything. The weakest balance sheet in a boom always cracks first; in 2000 the CLECs broke well before Cisco. Wide thresholds because the stock is violently volatile by nature.
TSMC fabricates essentially all of NVIDIA's chips and reports revenue monthly, not quarterly. Its stock plus its monthly number is NVDA's next earnings report visible a quarter early. A TSM drawdown while NVDA holds up means the ecosystem is repricing before the flagship.
Oracle is the hyperscaler running the buildout on borrowed money — capex around twice its operating cash flow, funded in the bond market. In March 2026 its credit-default swaps printed above their 2008 peak while the aggregate spread indexes barely moved: single-name AI credit stress that the averages dilute away. ORCL repricing while NVDA holds is the financing chain cracking before the flagship.
Extra yield junk-rated borrowers pay over Treasuries. Credit investors get paid to be paranoid, so spreads widen before equity accepts bad news. Speed matters more than level: +75bps in a month means lenders are repricing risk fast. Caveat this gauge is honest about: most AI debt is investment-grade or private, not junk — which is exactly why ORCL and BIZD sit beside it.
Hundreds of billions of AI data-center loans live in private-credit funds, outside every public spread index. Publicly traded BDC lenders (the BIZD ETF) reprice daily on that same book. BIZD lagging junk bonds (HYG) by 3%+ over a month while HYG itself holds means private marks are rotting before public credit admits it. Only counts on divergence: if both fall, it's a general credit selloff — the HY gauge catches that.
The most-owned expression of the AI trade. A 15% drawdown alone has happened repeatedly this cycle and recovered. Its job on this board is confirmation: NVDA cracking while CRWV/TSM already flashed and credit widens is the sequence starting. NVDA cracking alone is a dip.
Same spread measure for blue-chip debt, including bonds funding Oracle and Meta data centers. IG barely moves in normal corrections; IG widening alongside HY is regime change, not noise — the last domino in the chain.
These were calibrated empirically, and the honest finding is that most classic indicators confirm rather than predict. Treat the left half as early-warning and the right half as severity-grading once a drawdown is already underway.
Inversion alone is far too early — the 2022-24 inversion ran 535 trading days. The historical pre-top signal is a deep inversion (10yr−3mo trough ≤ −0.40pp) that then re-steepens rapidly (+0.40pp over 60 days, back above zero) as the market prices Fed cuts. That combination fired 1-4 months before the recession-linked tops of 1990, 2007, 2020 — and in Dec-2024, two months before the Feb-2025 top. Blind spot: rate-shock bears like 2022, where the top comes before the inversion.
Copper is a bet on activity, gold a bet on fear. The ratio dumping ≥9% in a month — while gold itself holds — is a growth scare with a safety bid. Only counts when gold holds: if both fall, it's a commodities selloff, not fear.
Global liquidity drains at the edge first. EEM underperforming SPY by 5%+ in a month while SPY sits near highs is the index-level version of "the marginal buyer cracks first." Caveat: inverts when EM itself is the bubble (2007).
Money borrowed against brokerage accounts (FINRA's monthly count) as a share of the economy. June 2026: $1.5 trillion — about 4.7% of GDP, the highest since modern records began in 1959, above the peaks before the 2000 crash (~2.8%), 2008 (~2.6%), and the 2021 meme-stock top (~3.9%); only the 1929 brokers'-loan era was higher. The honest caveats: the official number understates true leverage (it excludes leveraged ETFs, zero-day options, and portfolio margin), the level grades fragility, not timing — and this gauge sits outside the composite because it wasn't part of the historical calibration. The tell that upgrades it to alert: margin debt rolling over ≥8% from a record — it peaked 0–3 months before the 2000, 2007 and 2021 tops. Monthly data, ~3-week lag.
SKEW prices deep out-of-the-money puts; VVIX prices volatility-of-volatility; the gauge is whichever is richer versus its own 2-year range. Half-weight by design: it often peaks a month or two before the top then fades — a falling reading is not an all-clear. The value text also shows the VIX/VIX1Y ratio: front-month panic vs out-year pricing.
When 1-month volatility costs more than 3-month (backwardation) for 3+ days, big money is paying up for near-term protection. It lives here rather than on the AI chain because it's an index-level tell that fires with the drawdown, not ahead of it — every backwardation episode this cycle landed the same week the flagship cracked. A confirmer, honestly labeled.
If equal-weight falls hard while cap-weight sits at highs, fewer stocks carry the index — fragile. If RSP holds while mega-caps wobble, money is rotating within the market — healthy. Narrow breadth has been the standing condition of this entire bull market, which is why it grades the regime instead of posing as a link in the breakdown sequence.
Discretionary/staples rotation. Empirical surprise: this ratio rose into 7 of 10 tops — mild weakness means nothing. Only a violent ≥8% monthly collapse counts, and by then the correction is usually underway. Severity signal, not timing.
Global crashes are dollar-funding events: when leveraged books unwind, everyone needs dollars at once. A ≥4%/month dollar spike has essentially never been a false alarm (Lehman, eurozone, 2020, 2022) — but it comes after the equity top. It tells you the drawdown you're in is global deleveraging, not rotation.
Chicago Fed composite of 105 money-market, debt and equity measures. Mechanically loose at tops. Warn = ordinary correction underway; alert = credit event in progress. Grades severity of what's already happening.
Initial claims 4-week average vs its one-year low, sustained two weeks. +10% is a wobble; +20% has flagged every NBER recession since 1968 — but it lags equity tops by weeks to months. When this fires during a drawdown, the drawdown has a recession behind it: deepest tier of the playbook.