How It Works
One job: tell you why a market is noteworthy right now — and what has typically happened next. We detect statistical extremes, explain them, and show the historical path. You decide what to do with that. Context, not signals.
What we watch for
Every day we scan 35+ instruments for the moments that actually matter — where price, positioning, or the options market is stretched away from normal. Each one becomes an episode with a plain-language “why.”
Positioning extremes
When the retail FX crowd (Speculative Sentiment Index) or futures positioning (COT) reaches a statistically extreme level.
Price extremes
52-week highs/lows, month-range breaks, and range expansions — where price sits versus its own history.
Dealer gamma
Where options-dealer positioning (GEX) is likely to pin or amplify moves around key levels. Members-only; a direct exchange data license for this layer is in progress.
Macro surprises
Economic releases that land far from consensus — the surprises that move FX.
What you get: the dossier
Click any instrument and you see everything at once — and, for members, the part that matters most: what happened the last times it looked like this.
Where it sits: price percentiles, distance to 52-week highs/lows, realized vol and carry — in pips.
Positioning: retail SSI and COT futures positioning, together.
Correlations & drivers: what's moving with it today, and what's driving the move.
What happened last time: the historical distribution and typical path for similar setups, with a p25–p75 band — not a prediction, the record.
Context, not signals
We do not tell you what to buy or sell, and we do not claim to predict direction. What we provide is the statistical context around a market — how stretched it is, and what has typically followed — computed point-in-time from the same data our research is built on.
How you use it is your decision: as a volatility filter, a second opinion on a setup, or a way to size and time risk. The value is understanding the market, not chasing an alert.
How we got here
FX Engineer is not the product we set out to build. We started with a hypothesis — that fading retail crowd positioning at extremes would produce a directional trading edge. Several research papers later, our own data told a different story, and we followed the data.
Established the SSI dataset: millions of observations across 28 pairs since 2002. Validated data provenance and quality.
Tested whether crowd positioning causes price movement. Result: null. Price leads positioning, not the other way around.
Mapped session volatility structure. Found stable, real structure: London AM consistently produces the largest moves, and it does not decay.
Tested the directional edge of fading retail extremes. Result: a coin flip. Our corrected analysis retracted the original, much higher figure — and we published the correction as prominently as every other finding.
What survived: positioning and price extremes reliably flag volatility and context, even when they say nothing about direction. That reliable, honest signal is the foundation of what we do now.
When the data contradicts our hypotheses, we say so — publicly, with the same prominence as the original claim. We publish null results and corrections. We do not cherry-pick.
Why FX Engineer
| FX Engineer | Typical Sentiment Product | |
|---|---|---|
| Publishes null results | Yes — RP-002, RP-004 | No |
| Corrects its data when wrong | Publicly, same prominence | Original numbers kept |
| Methodology | Published research | Black box |
| Track record | Public, auditable, exportable | Screenshots or none |
| Directional claims | None — context only | “Fade the crowd” |
The systems under the hood are laid out in What Powers the Intelligence, and the full methodology lives in our research library.
Who this is for
Discretionary FX traders
Use the context as a second opinion and a volatility filter alongside your own technical or fundamental read.
Systematic / algo traders
Pull the intelligence and history via API and build positioning- and context-aware logic.
Options traders
Use extremes and volatility context to time entries and gauge whether a move is likely.
Risk managers
Know when your exposure pairs are stretched and anticipate volatility before it hits.
See it on today's market, or join for the full picture.