The Scan phase of Woodring’s Loop fails in one of two ways. Either nobody is watching anything, and the plan finds out it broke from the April variance report. Or somebody built a dashboard with forty tiles and nobody opens it. The fix for both is the same: a short list of public series, each one attached to a specific assumption in the plan, read once a week by a person who can say in one sentence what a move would mean for a commitment. These twelve are the ones we start with. All of them are free, all of them are on FRED, and all of them have a page in the Signal Library with the current reading and a plain note on what it tests.
No values here on purpose. Values go stale the week they are written. What does not go stale is knowing which line in your plan each series is pointed at.
Cost of money
Fed funds target, upper bound. The ceiling on the policy rate. This is the single most load-bearing input in most plans and the one most often written once and never revisited. It moves on a published meeting schedule, so the signal is not the rate itself but what the market expects the next meeting to do. Read it alongside the prediction-market layer. A plan whose rate line disagrees with the market is a plan that has already made a bet it did not mean to.
SOFR.The overnight rate that floating-rate debt is actually priced from. If your revolver, your term loan, or your customer financing floats, this is the number your interest expense line is built on, and it tracks the policy rate closely but not perfectly. A move here shows up in cash before it shows up in anyone’s forecast.
The 2s10s spread. Ten-year Treasury yield minus the two-year. A positive, widening spread says the market expects growth and higher rates later. A flattening or inverted spread says the short end is pricing more tightening than the long end believes the economy can hold. It is not a recession timer. It is a read on whether the market thinks the current rate path is sustainable, and a plan with a multi-year financing assumption should know which way it is leaning.
Cost of credit
BBB corporate spread. What investment-grade borrowers at the bottom of the grade pay over Treasuries. This tests the financing cost of any capital project and the health of your customers who borrow. Spreads that widen while the policy rate holds mean credit is tightening on its own, and that reaches the real economy faster than the Fed does.
Moody’s Baa yield. The all-in borrowing cost for a typical lower-investment-grade company, policy rate and spread together. If your plan has a cost-of-capital line or a hurdle rate, this is the public series closest to it. A plan that assumed a Baa yield from September and is being approved in November should check whether the two still match.
The consumer
30-year fixed mortgage rate. The most-watched consumer rate and the one that moves housing, remodeling, furniture, appliances, and the willingness of a household to move for a job. It can fall from a peak and still be well above where a plan assumed it, both at once, which is exactly what happened this planning season. Any plan with a housing-adjacent demand line needs the date its mortgage assumption was written next to the number.
Deposits at commercial banks. Weekly. Rising deposits mean households and businesses are holding cash. Falling deposits mean they are spending it, moving it to higher-yielding places, or both. Read with the labor series below, it tells you whether consumer resilience is coming from income or from savings, and savings run out.
Labor
Initial jobless claims. Weekly, and the fastest-moving labor series there is. Claims rising for several consecutive weeks is the earliest public sign that layoffs are broadening. For a plan with a hiring wave in it, this is the series that says whether the talent market is loosening. For a plan with a consumer demand line, it is the first warning that incomes are about to.
Continued claims. The number of people still collecting after the first week. Initial claims tell you whether people are losing jobs. Continued claims tell you whether they are finding new ones. Rising continued claims with flat initial claims is the quieter signal: the layoffs are not accelerating, but the people already laid off are staying out longer. That is a demand story with a lag built in.
Cost of moving things
Diesel. Weekly retail diesel price. This is the freight line in every plan that ships anything, and the input cost line for agriculture, construction, and most of logistics. Diesel moves on supply, refinery capacity, and seasonal demand, not just on crude, so it can move while headline oil does not. A plan that fixed its freight assumption in September should look at the diesel series on the day it goes to the board.
The whole economy, and how nervous it is
Weekly Economic Index.A single weekly composite from the New York Fed built from a handful of daily and weekly series, scaled to read like year-over-year GDP growth. It is the closest thing to a real-time growth number that exists, and it moves weeks before the quarterly GDP print. Use it as the top-line check on a plan’s overall growth assumption: if the WEI has turned while the plan still assumes the growth rate from the last quarterly release, the plan is late.
The VIX.Expected volatility of the S&P 500 over the coming month, derived from option prices. It is not a measure of the economy. It is a measure of how much the market is willing to pay for insurance, which is a measure of how uncertain the people with the most capital feel this week. A spike that reverses in two days is noise a quarterly review would miss both ways. A level that stays elevated for a month is the signal that financing windows and customer decisions are about to get slower.
How to actually run the Scan
Twelve series is already plenty. Most companies need eight. Pick the ones that map to a line in your plan and drop the rest; a series with no assumption attached is trivia. For each one, write the assumption it tests, the value of the series on the date the assumption was written, and the move that would make you re-open the line. Then one person reads the list every week and writes a half page: what moved, what it touches, whether anything crossed its line. That half page is the input to the monthly Story read and the Convergence Review.
The point of the Scan is not to know the numbers. It is to know, before the board meeting, which assumptions the world has already overtaken. The monthly Signal Layer shows what a disciplined read of these series looks like in practice, and the Predictive Planning Index rolls five of them into a single pressure reading for the planning season. The full Scan method, including how to add internal and human signal to the public layer, is in the book.