What this actually shows
Sector heatmaps tell you who finished up and who finished down. That is the wrong question. Price-based rotation shows you who already moved. Capital flow shows you who is being moved into.
The math is unglamorous. Take each ticker’s dollar volume for the day and weight it by where the stock closed inside its own high-low range — a close at the high counts as full accumulation, a close at the low as full distribution, a midrange close as roughly neutral. That is the day’s money flow. Sum it across every ticker in an industry, then sum those days over whatever window you pick. That figure is the row’s bar.
But raw dollars do not mean much on their own. Banks moving $6 billion is a quiet Tuesday. Gold miners moving $6 billion is a regime change. So every row also carries the flow divided by what is normal for that industry over the same stretch — the × badge. That is what lets you spot rotation into a quiet corner of the market before it shows up in any sector index.
Why four windows
One day answers “what just happened.” A week filters the single-session noise. A month shows a theme with legs. A quarter separates a long-running rotation from a fresh one. Every window is judged against the equal-length window right before it, so the comparison is always like-for-like — this week against last week, this quarter against last quarter. The swing chips under the board are that comparison, ranked.
Why 49 industries, not 11 sectors
The 11 GICS sectors are too coarse to see anything useful. “Information Technology” lumps Apple, Salesforce, and a fabless semiconductor design house together. Fama-French 49 splits the market finely enough that semiconductors gets its own slot, but coarsely enough that every slot has dozens of tickers in it. Sweet spot for spotting rotation.
Who this is built for
Swing traders deciding where to hunt before they screen for candidates. If capital is rotating into Aerospace, screen Aerospace. If it has been leaving Banks for two straight months, skip the banks even when individual names look textbook. The ledger does not tell you what to buy. It tells you which industries are worth looking at first.
Questions readers keep asking
- What is the difference between this and a sector heatmap?
- A heatmap shows price change. This shows dollar flow. A stock can finish red while still absorbing capital, when a large block buyer at the bid moves volume without moving price up. This ledger catches that.
- What does the × badge on a row mean?
- How unusual the period’s flow is for that specific industry: the net dollar flow divided by what that industry normally turns over across the same number of sessions. Banks moving $6 billion is a quiet Tuesday; gold miners moving $6 billion is a regime change. A row at 1× or more — net flow exceeding a full normal session’s turnover for every session in the window — is highlighted.
- Why don't sector ETFs match what I see here?
- Sector ETFs are weighted by market cap and track the sector-level price index. This ledger weights every ticker’s net flow equally inside its industry bucket and ignores price level. Only the dollar volume of the move matters.
- Is this real-time?
- Closing prints only. Each trading day’s figures snap at the close. The latest day shows up overnight after the daily pipeline runs.
- How does the prior-window comparison work?
- Whatever window you pick — one day, a week, a month, a quarter — the ledger sums flow over those sessions and compares against the equal-length window immediately before it. The swing chips surface the industries whose flow changed the most between the two windows: that change is the rotation.