Asset map: no asset wins in every regime
No asset wins in every regime. Country by country, the map shows where an asset class has historically played its part — and where it has lost it.
An asset has no virtue, it has a context
Gold doesn't protect in the abstract. Equities don't rise by nature. Every class behaves according to the regime the country is in. Same asset, two different regimes, two opposite stories.
That's where the map starts. For each country, it reads the regime, then colors the chosen asset class by its consistency with that regime. Green where the asset has historically held up. Red where it has suffered. Gray where the signal is too weak to call.
The regime doesn't come from a grid
We didn't impose a growth-inflation grid decided in advance. We looked at what assets actually respond to, then kept what held up. Two axes emerge — two, not four boxes declared ahead of time.
Two dimensions inferred from the data, not imposed. The real rate: does invested money earn faster than prices rise? (the ten-year borrowing rate, minus inflation) — when it's low, gold has the edge; when it's high, financial assets regain the advantage. The market trend: is the country's market rising or falling? (its price against its average of recent months). The two crossed together define the regime. Neither a forecast nor a quadrant set a priori.
The color is a memory, not a forecast
The color doesn't say what will happen. It says what has already happened. For the chosen class, we look at how it behaved in this regime, over a long reference history — and we sum that behavior up in a single shade.
How an asset class behaved when the regime was this one, measured by the Sortino ratio: how much it returned against the drops it puts you through, once inflation is stripped out. At equal return, two assets are told apart by pain — the one that sinks less in the bad stretches has the better Sortino. The calculation rests on a long reference history (United States since 1880), the same for every country in a given regime. Green: the asset came through this regime well. Red: it came through it badly. An observed past, never a promised return.
A time slider lets you replay the map month by month: watch a regime flip, and the asset's consistency flip with it.
What a country's detail tells you
Clicking a country opens its detail: its current regime, and the reference behavior of the chosen class in that regime — the average annual return once inflation is stripped out (the real CAGR), the worst drop from peak to trough (the drawdown), the Sortino, the number of months observed. These figures describe the regime over the long history, not the country's own story: two countries in the same regime share the same reference. It's the regime, not the flag, that governs how an asset responds — and the deepest history available (US markets go back to 1880) holds enough occurrences of each regime to measure it seriously. When an asset cushions equity drops instead of following them, a "true diversifier" marker flags it — that's a role, not a performance.
Not every class reads the same way
- Equities, bonds, gold, energy, commodities: colored by their regime consistency, this historical Sortino.
- Currency: not a market regime but a soundness, read separately — positive real rate, current account, fiscal discipline, rule of law. The same criteria as the Currency page.
- Bitcoin: a study layer, outside the UCITS universe (the European framework for retail funds). Present for analysis, but not colored on the product map: it tracks risk, not gold, and doesn't fit these regimes.
A portfolio is also a geography
US equities and European equities don't live the same regime. Nor do a Japanese bond and a US bond. So the map doesn't pick a class: it picks an exposure — an asset and a country.
From the basket to the allocation
Every exposure you keep drops into a basket. The basket isn't an allocation: it's a list of consistent exposures. You then hand it to the portfolio builder, which assigns weights. Equities, bonds, gold, bitcoin and currency go to the builder; energy and commodities remain, for now, map readings.
Implication pour l'allocation
The map is there to spot exposures consistent with the regime. Weights, execution order and steering are decided afterwards, in the dedicated tools.
What the map does not do
- It predicts no market.
- It gives no expected return.
- It doesn't tell you what to buy: it describes a historical consistency, not a recommendation.
- It simplifies — two axes, a past behavior, without the price paid today.
Green isn't a green light. It's a reminder: in this regime, this asset held up — often, not always.
Key takeaways
- No asset wins in every regime: the map ties each class to its context.
- The regime is read from the real rate and the market trend — inferred from the data, not an imposed grid.
- The color is a historical behavior (Sortino, US 1880+), never an expected performance.
- An exposure is an asset and a country; the basket prepares the allocation, it doesn't replace it.
Go further
- The Cap Nord method — how we read the markets without predicting them.
- Macro regimes: reading the asset matrix — the real-rate × trend axes.
- Why the classic grid isn't enough — the critique of growth × inflation quadrants.
- Building a robust portfolio — from the basket to the allocation.
- Volatility is not risk — why enduring beats predicting.
See regimes by country
Regimes derived from public macro indicators (ECB, Eurostat, IMF, World Bank) read from the real rate and the market trend, via the internal Cap Nord pipeline. Asset consistency: historical Sortino by regime (United States since 1880), internal Cap Nord study — descriptive and historical, neither a forecast nor investment advice.