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Course 4 · 20 lessons

The Macro School

Futures and the forces behind the tape — taught the way a stock investor actually needs them: not to trade, but to read.

Twenty lessons, four units. What futures contracts really are and why leverage makes them dangerous, the handful of markets — rates, the dollar, energy, metals, index futures — that quietly price everything you own, how professionals read the growth-and-inflation regime, and how that reading reaches all the way down into an ordinary stock portfolio. You will almost certainly never need to trade a future. You very much need to be able to read one.

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Unit 1 — How Futures Actually Work

The instrument itself: what a futures contract is, who is really on each side, and why leverage, the curve, and settlement trip up everyone who skips them.

01
What a Future Actually Is

Before any of the macro payoff, let's get the instrument right, because the jargon makes it sound harder than it is.

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02
Who Actually Uses Futures

Every futures contract has two sides, and the fastest way to understand the whole market is to learn who sits on each.

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03
How to Read a Futures Quote

A futures quote packs more into a few characters than a stock ticker does, and the extra parts are where beginners get lost.

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04
Margin and Leverage: The Amplifier

This is the lesson that explains why futures make fortunes and craters out of the same small move.

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05
Contango and Backwardation

Two intimidating words hide one simple, powerful idea: the shape of the futures curve tells you what the market thinks about the future, and it quietly determines whether long-term futures positions bleed or bloom.

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06
Settlement and Rolling: How Contracts End

Every future dies on a known date, and what happens at that death is the source of the market's scariest myth — the one about waking up to a truckload of crude oil in your driveway.

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Unit 2 — The Markets That Move Everything

The five markets that set the price of money, energy, safety, and stocks themselves — the ones whose moves show up in your portfolio whether you watch them or not.

07
The Yield Complex: The Price of Money

Welcome to Unit 2 — the handful of markets that price everything else.

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08
The Dollar: The World’s Denominator

Almost everything with a price is priced in dollars — oil, gold, global trade, emerging-market debt.

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09
Energy: The Cost of Everything Physical

Energy is the input to nearly every physical thing in the economy — it's in the shipping, the manufacturing, the farming, and the plastic.

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10
The Metals: Fear and the Real Economy

Metals split neatly into two stories, and confusing them is a classic error.

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11
Equity Index Futures: The Market’s Pulse

You already own stocks; this lesson shows you the market where the stock market itself is priced overnight.

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Unit 3 — Reading the Regime

The two-dial framework professionals actually use: growth and inflation, the real rate underneath both, and the signals that whisper which way the weather is turning.

12
The Growth & Inflation Quadrant

Unit 3 is the payoff the whole course was climbing toward: the framework professionals actually use to make sense of everything.

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13
The Real Rate: The Master Variable

If you learn one number that most investors never think about, make it this one.

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14
Risk-On, Risk-Off

Some days the market seems to move as one giant organism — everything risky up together, or everything risky down together.

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15
The Yield Curve as Forecast

The yield curve is the single most famous forecasting tool in macroeconomics, and its most alarming shape has preceded nearly every modern recession.

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16
Commodities as Early Warning

Official economic data arrives late and revised; commodity markets price the real economy in real time.

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Unit 4 — Macro Meets Your Money

Where all of it lands: the overnight gaps, the cost of capital, macro as telemetry instead of temptation, and the graduation lesson — reading the weather without trading it.

17
Why Equity Investors Watch Futures

Unit 4 brings it all home to the portfolio you actually own.

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18
Macro as Telemetry

Here's the twist that echoes the Options School's flow lesson: you can benefit enormously from the macro markets without ever placing a macro trade.

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19
Regime and Your Worst Case

Macro fluency earns its keep at exactly one moment: the day the weather turns violent.

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20
When Not to Trade Macro

Twenty lessons of futures and regimes, and here's the graduation: for almost every investor, the correct amount of macro trading is none.

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Not financial advice · Educational only