WHY LIQUIDITY, NOT PRICE
Every cycle, the same sequence: liquidity moves first, assets reprice second, the narrative arrives third. By the time a move is a headline, the flow that caused it is weeks old. Global liquidity is a ~$188 trillion pool of balance-sheet capacity — when it expands, risk assets inflate; when it drains, they gasp. Crypto sits at the far end of the risk curve, which makes it the most liquidity-sensitive asset class on earth — the canary in the coalmine.
LiqTide does one thing: it watches the pool — the Fed, the US Treasury, the ECB, the Bank of Japan, the PBoC, Tether & Circle's mint desks, BlackRock's ETF complex — and renders the result as one map and one number, once a day.
THE CORE FORMULA — US NET LIQUIDITY
NET LIQUIDITY = WALCL − TGA − RRP
- WALCL — the Fed's total balance sheet (H.4.1 release, Thursdays). The QE/QT impulse.
- TGA — the Treasury General Account, the government's checking account at the Fed (Daily Treasury Statement, ~4pm ET). When the Treasury rebuilds its war chest, it pulls cash out of markets. When it spends, it injects.
- RRP — the overnight reverse-repo facility (NY Fed, daily). Parked cash; a buffer that absorbs or releases liquidity. Once it's spent, drains hit reserves directly.
This is a proxy, not gospel — judged on 2–4 week persistence, never daily noise. Around it we layer the faster crypto-native signals: stablecoin supply (dry powder), spot-ETF flows (institutional bid), the broad dollar (the global funding constraint), and the SOFR−IORB spread (plumbing stress).
THE LIQTIDE SCORE™ (0–100)
The gauge at the top of the dashboard — read it like a Fear & Greed index, except it measures the cause (money entering or leaving the system) rather than the mood. 0 = drained, 100 = flooded.
Proprietary blend, open methodology. The exact weights are published below because we have nothing to hide — but the Score itself is computed nowhere else. Quote it freely ("LiqTide Score: 38 — Ebb Tide"); attribution to liqtide.com is all we ask. A weighted composite of liquidity impulses, each squashed to a −1…+1 score:
| COMPONENT | WEIGHT | READS |
|---|---|---|
| US net liquidity, 4-week change | 30% | The core drain/inject impulse |
| Stablecoin supply, 7-day change | 25% | Crypto dry powder loading or leaving |
| Broad dollar, 1-month change (inverted) | 15% | Offshore funding pressure |
| ON-RRP release, 4-week | 10% | Buffer feeding markets |
| Spot-ETF net flows, 5-day | 10% | The BlackRock bid |
| BTC-dominance rotation, 30-day (inverted) | 10% | Risk appetite down the curve |
THE LEAD LINE — WHY IT RUNS PAST TODAY
The most-watched relationship in this niche: liquidity tends to lead Bitcoin by roughly 10–13 weeks. The Lead Line chart takes smoothed US net liquidity and shifts it forward 10 weeks against BTC — which means the cyan line extends past today: the liquidity that will be pressing on price over the coming weeks has, in a literal sense, already been printed.
Read it honestly: the lead is real but unstable — it has ranged from ~6 to ~15 weeks across cycles, and in some stretches price has led liquidity. We label it "context, not clockwork" because that is exactly what it is: a regime backdrop, not a timing machine.
SECTOR ROTATION — WHERE THE MONEY IS GOING
Nine asset classes on one wheel: AI/megacap tech, broad stocks, small caps, Bitcoin, ETH/alts, the stablecoin fleet, gold, bonds and the dollar. Streams run from the weakest sectors to the strongest, and the center shows the verdict: RISK-ON ROTATION, MIXED TAPE or FLIGHT TO SAFETY.
How it's computed: true cross-sector fund flows are not public data — nobody has them, including the paid terminals. The accepted lens is relative momentum: a 1-week + 1-month performance blend, scaled to each asset's volatility so a 3% gold move counts like a 10% BTC move. Money goes where strength is. One exception is genuinely flow-based: the stablecoin leg uses actual supply (mints and burns), not price.
THE FIVE TIDE LEVELS — THE PLAYBOOK
What each band has historically been associated with, per the liquidity-cycle framework. This is a framework for thinking, not a trade signal.
| BAND | NAME | THE FRAMEWORK SAYS |
|---|---|---|
| 0–19 | RIP TIDE | Heavy drain. Capital preservation regimes: cash and quality outperform; the far end of the risk curve gets repriced hardest. |
| 20–39 | EBB TIDE | Liquidity receding. Defense favored: majors over alts, hedges (gold/BTC core) accumulated on weakness rather than chased. |
| 40–59 | SLACK WATER | Transition. The dollar usually breaks the tie. Position light, watch the Treasury calendar and stablecoin flows for the turn. |
| 60–79 | FLOOD TIDE | Liquidity rising. Risk assets historically get the wind at their back; rotation extends from majors outward as dominance falls. |
| 80–100 | SPRING TIDE | Maximum inflow. The phase fortunes get made in — and the phase that breeds the excess the next drain punishes. Euphoria is a signal too. |
The regime tracker (ACCUMULATION → MOMENTUM → SPECULATION → TURBULENCE) maps the same cycle by the trend of net liquidity: 13-week direction vs 4-week direction. Late-cycle phases see commodities and defensive rotation lead; early phases favor duration and beta.
DATA SOURCES — ALL PRIMARY, ALL VERIFIABLE
- Federal Reserve H.4.1 / FRED — WALCL, reserves, SOFR, IORB, central-bank assets
- US Treasury FiscalData — Daily Treasury Statement (TGA)
- NY Fed Markets API — overnight reverse-repo results
- DefiLlama — stablecoin supply
- Farside Investors — spot Bitcoin ETF flows
- CoinGecko — BTC price & dominance; Stooq — gold, megacap tech
Nothing proprietary, nothing hidden — the edge is the synthesis and the discipline of looking every single day.
FREE API
The full daily payload is open. Build with it; we ask only for attribution (a link to liqtide.com).
GET https://liqtide.com/data/latest.json
Includes: net-liquidity series, TGA/RRP/reserves, stablecoin supply, BTC + dominance, ETF flows, dollar index, the Tide Index with component scores, regime, the 11 flow vectors and the active signal list. Refreshed daily ~22:45 UTC.
EMBED THE TIDE
Put the live Tide Index on your own site or dashboard:
<iframe src="https://liqtide.com/embed.html"
width="440" height="96" frameborder="0"
title="LiqTide — Tide Index"></iframe>
CAVEATS — READ THIS
Net liquidity is a proxy. Lead/lag relationships between liquidity and price are real but unstable, and partly debated. Nothing on this site is investment advice; it is an analytical visualization of public data. The tide tells you the conditions — you sail your own boat.