The PHOHA Indicator
A 0 to 100 temperature for how a market is trading right now, shown for every index, stock, ETF, crypto, and currency on the Economy & Markets board.
PHOHA is Steeped's own indicator. It combines three original readings of a market's recent price action into one number, its temperature, measured in degrees from 0 (ice cold) to 100 (piping hot). It describes how a market is trading. It is not a forecast, and it is not a recommendation to buy or sell anything.
The three readings
Each reading runs from 0 to 100, with 50 as neutral.
- Pressure: whether buyers or sellers have had the upper hand lately, and by how much. It runs from heavy selling through balanced to heavy buying.
- Stretch: how far the price sits from its own normal range. It runs from washed out through near its norm to stretched.
- Rhythm: whether the recent move has been steady and persistent or choppy. It runs from steady slide through no clear rhythm to steady climb.
How to read the temperature
- 0–20°, Ice cold: sellers in control, price well below its usual range.
- 20–40°, Cooling: leaning weak.
- 40–60°, Lukewarm: no strong lean either way.
- 60–80°, Warming: leaning strong.
- 80–100°, Piping hot: buyers in control, price well above its usual range.
The board also shows a market-wide PHOHA: the average across the four major US indexes, the largest US stocks, Bitcoin, and Ether, with how many of them are warm.
Built to be comparable
- Always 0 to 100. No reading can run off the scale.
- One scale for every market. Readings don't depend on the price level, the currency, or how volatile a market normally is, so 70° on Bitcoin and 70° on the S&P 500 describe the same kind of move.
- Symmetric. A sell-off and a rally of the same shape get mirror-image readings.
- No hindsight. Each reading uses only data that existed at that moment.
Past patterns are no promise of future results. PHOHA is informational only and is not investment, financial, or trading advice. PHOHA is paused while we move to licensed market data.
The name
PHOHA is named for Steeped's founder, Kriss Phoha.