The Palanor Indices
The instruments Palanor builds to read what the singular series cannot.
Anyone can show you CPI. Anyone can show you the VIX. Palanor builds composites — transparently disclosed, weight-by-weight, with public-source components.
The Palanor Indices
Anyone can show you CPI. Anyone can show you the VIX. Palanor builds composites — transparently disclosed, weight-by-weight, with public-source components.
What worried sounds like. A composite of layoff + recession mention frequency, confidence dispersion, and the inverse of buyback mention frequency — measuring how defensive the boardroom is, in one number 0–100.
The Hesitation Index reads the language of caution. When confidence drops, dispersion widens, and the room collectively talks more about layoffs and recession while talking less about buybacks, the index rises. Above 65, you are in a measurable hesitation regime — the corpus is communicating defensive posture. This is the leading-edge soft indicator that precedes harder macro confirmation by 30–90 days. Named for The Hesitation Current — the slow, multi-quarter slowdown that doesn't quite become a recession but reshapes capital deployment across the economy.
Layoff mentions catch labor-market caution directly. Recession mentions catch forward-looking macro caution. Confidence dispersion catches the regime in which executives are increasingly disagreeing about what comes next — the moment a coherent story breaks down and individual companies start hedging their narrative. The inverse of buyback mentions catches the capital-allocation tell: when boards stop talking about returning capital and start talking about reserving it, that is the strongest single signal that they are bracing for something.
Above 65 — the corpus is in measurable hesitation. Between 35 and 65 — normal range. Below 35 — confidence regime; companies are deploying, not defending. The strongest read happens during early earnings season for a given quarter: a fast rise in The Hesitation Index across the first 20% of S&P 500 reports tends to land before the broader macro data catches up by 4–8 weeks.
The Hesitation Index reads language, not action. Companies can talk defensive and still grow, and vice versa. The number is most useful read against actual capex disclosures and the FRED labor data — when the language and the actions diverge, the index identifies the gap rather than resolving it.
Capital reserve talk before capital reserve action is the signal.
Every component, every weight. The 30-day spark shows how the underlying series has moved; the transform column shows how it converts to a comparable scale before weighting. Direction indicates whether rising values raise or lower the index.
| Component | Source | Weight | Direction | Transform | 30d | 24h | 30d Δ | Now contributing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Layoff Mentions per Call (Discourse) | Palanor | 30% | positive | zscore_24m | 0.00 | ▼ 0.125 | -0.425 | |
| Recession Mentions per Call (Discourse) | Palanor | 30% | positive | zscore_24m |
Numen for the public read:
Palanor reads hesitation index as depressed at 21.8 of 100 — well below its 24-month neutral. The composite is pulling against the regime.
24-month history of this index. The composite is recomputed daily; values are stored with timestamps.
Y-axis auto-zoomed · data clusters tightly
| # | Computed at | Value | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| 40 | 7/11/2026, 8:45:42 AM | 21.7921 | -0.2256 |
| 39 | 7/10/2026, 8:45:20 AM | 22.0177 | -0.2290 |
| 38 | 7/9/2026, 8:45:59 AM | 22.2467 | -0.2377 |
| 37 | 7/8/2026, 8:45:59 AM | 22.4845 | -0.2310 |
| 36 | 7/7/2026, 8:46:00 AM | 22.7155 | -0.2340 |
| 35 | 7/6/2026, 8:46:00 AM | 22.9494 | -0.2416 |
| 34 | 7/5/2026, 8:46:00 AM | 23.1910 | -0.2445 |
| 33 | 7/4/2026, 8:46:00 AM | 23.4355 | -0.2473 |
| 32 | 7/3/2026, 8:46:00 AM | 23.6828 | -0.2498 |
| 31 | 7/2/2026, 8:46:00 AM | 23.9326 | -0.3243 |
| 30 | 7/1/2026, 8:45:41 AM | 24.2569 | -0.3299 |
| 29 | 6/30/2026, 8:45:43 AM | 24.5868 | -0.3351 |
| 28 | 6/29/2026, 8:45:57 AM | 24.9219 | -0.3045 |
| 27 | 6/28/2026, 8:45:57 AM | 25.2264 | -0.3052 |
| 26 | 6/27/2026, 8:45:56 AM | 25.5315 | -0.3040 |
| 25 | 6/26/2026, 8:45:56 AM | 25.8356 | -0.3002 |
| 24 | 6/25/2026, 8:45:35 AM | 26.1358 | -0.2926 |
| 23 | 6/24/2026, 8:45:36 AM | 26.4284 | -0.2779 |
| 22 | 6/23/2026, 8:45:10 AM | 26.7063 | -0.2553 |
| 21 | 6/22/2026, 8:45:11 AM | 26.9616 | -0.3128 |
| 20 | 6/21/2026, 8:45:13 AM | 27.2744 | -0.4761 |
| 19 | 6/20/2026, 8:45:18 AM | 27.7505 | -0.4342 |
| 18 | 6/19/2026, 8:45:18 AM | 28.1847 | -0.4490 |
| 17 | 6/18/2026, 8:45:38 AM | 28.6336 | -0.4648 |
| 16 | 6/17/2026, 8:45:29 AM | 29.0985 | -0.4820 |
| 15 | 6/16/2026, 8:45:15 AM | 29.5804 | -0.5005 |
| 14 | 6/15/2026, 8:45:16 AM | 30.0810 | -0.5208 |
| 13 | 6/14/2026, 8:45:47 AM | 30.6018 | -0.5429 |
| 12 | 6/13/2026, 8:45:14 AM | 31.1447 | -0.5673 |
| 11 | 6/12/2026, 8:45:23 AM | 31.7120 | -0.5944 |
| 10 | 6/11/2026, 8:45:29 AM | 32.3063 | -0.6247 |
| 9 | 6/10/2026, 8:45:45 AM | 32.9311 | -1.2704 |
| 8 | 6/9/2026, 8:45:57 AM | 34.2015 | -0.6895 |
| 7 | 6/8/2026, 10:53:10 PM | 34.8909 | 0.0000 |
| 6 | 6/8/2026, 8:45:40 AM | 34.8909 | -0.7331 |
| 5 | 6/7/2026, 8:45:36 AM | 35.6240 | -0.7846 |
| 4 | 6/6/2026, 8:45:35 AM | 36.4086 | -0.8465 |
| 3 | 6/5/2026, 8:45:58 AM | 37.2551 | -0.9235 |
| 2 | 6/4/2026, 7:12:16 PM | 38.1786 | 0.0000 |
| 1 | 6/4/2026, 4:21:29 PM | 38.1786 | — |
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/https://www.atlantafed.org/researchhttps://www.clevelandfed.org/our-research/indicators-and-datahttps://data.oecd.org/leadind/consumer-confidence-index-cci.htmhttps://www.cnn.com/markets/fear-and-greedhttps://trends.google.com/Stewards see Palanor Indices tuned to their mandate.
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| ▼ 0.048 |
| ▼ 0.058 |
| -0.058 |
| Confidence Dispersion (Discourse) | Palanor | 25% | positive | zscore_24m | ▲ 0.030 | ▼ 0.164 | -0.563 |
| Buyback Mentions per Call (Discourse) | Palanor | 15% | negative | zscore_24m | ▼ 4.14 | ▲ 1.20 | -0.232 |