How it works
Driptometer reads ten financial indicators every day and combines them into a single risk score from 0 to 47. The score maps to one of three weather conditions — Clear Skies, Partly Cloudy, or Storm Clouds. That's the whole product.
The signals we read
Each signal is one of ten indicators that academic and professional investors have used for decades — moving averages, the VIX, the yield curve, credit spreads, market breadth, valuation. We did not invent them; we curated them. The choice of which ten, and how heavily to weight each, is what makes Driptometer Driptometer.
How the score is calculated
Every signal has a weight — between 2 and 7 points. When a signal fires, its weight is added to your daily score.
Two of the ten signals — market breadth and complacency — are "context-sensitive." If they fire on their own, with nothing else corroborating them, their weight is halved. This stops a single ambiguous reading from dragging your whole score up.
What the tool does NOT do
Driptometer cannot predict the future. It cannot tell you whether to buy or sell. It cannot distinguish between a market that is about to crash and a market that has just finished crashing — these often look identical on the indicators.
What it does do is give you a calm, plain-English read on where market conditions are right now, compared with history. That's it.
Backtested honesty
We tested the tool on key historical moments to ensure consistency:
- October 2007 (Pre-GFC): 19/47
- February 2020 (Pre-COVID Crash): 19/47
- November 2023 (Healthy Bull Market): 6/47
The tool reads conditions consistently — but it also reads 30/47 at the March 2020 bottom, which was the buying opportunity of a decade. The same score, two opposite outcomes. We are honest about this throughout the app.