How Zensei measures market leadership

Zensei tracks 100+ sector, industry, thematic, commodity and bond ETFs plus the S&P 500 benchmark (SPY). For each we ingest daily adjusted closing prices, hourly prices, and company fundamentals such as price-to-earnings and price-to-sales ratios.

Analytics are recomputed every hour during market operation. Public previews (like the free rotation chart) are served from a snapshot refreshed daily; the in-app experience uses the hourly data directly.

The core building block is the rate of change (ROC): the percentage move of an adjusted close over a fixed calendar window. We compute it over six windows, from one week to one year (1W, 2W, 1M, 3M, 6M and 1Y) — the same windows you can switch between on every chart.

A sector's spread is its ROC minus the S&P 500's ROC over the same window. A +2.0 one-month spread means the sector beat the market by two percentage points over that month. Rising price alone never counts as leadership — only outperformance does.

The rotation map plots every sector on two spread windows at once. The vertical axis is the current short-window spread (default: 1M). The horizontal axis is the longer window, shifted back in time so the two windows don't overlap. That shift is what makes rotation visible — you see where a sector's leadership was versus where it is now, instead of two blurred readings of the same recent move.

Relative strength (RS) is the ratio of a symbol's price to the benchmark's price, computed on hourly data. When the line rises, the symbol is outperforming; when it falls, it is lagging — regardless of what the price chart alone suggests.

We smooth the RS line with a stack of moving averages, from short to long-term, and classify its health from where RS sits relative to them:

Spreads tell you where a sector stands; momentum tells you how fast that is changing. At the sector level we compare intraday (hourly-bar) rates of change across four lookback windows and classify the trend — strong, mixed, weakening, weak, or a short-term dip inside an intact longer-term uptrend.

At the stock level we compare spread velocity across the 1W, 2W and 1M windows (each normalised to a per-week rate) and label the pattern: accelerating, strong, cruising, pulling back, fading or weak.

Zensei is an analytics tool, not a registered investment adviser, and nothing on the platform is investment advice or a recommendation. The measurements above describe the recent past; they do not predict the future, and past performance does not guarantee future results. Thresholds and window lengths are periodically recalibrated — when the methodology changes, this page changes with it.

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