Institutional Risk Intelligence · Singapore
Vol is a price.
Fragility is a state.
Implied volatility tells you what the market charges for the next move. Altus measures the state of the system beneath it — how much stress is priced, how synced it is, and how fragile the structure carrying it has become — each scored daily against its own history.
Market analytics and information services only. Not investment advice, not a research report, not a recommendation to buy or sell any security.
Fragility Score
83rd
percentile, against its own history
HIGH
Specimen reading · one of three coordinates — stress, sync, fragility
The Blind Spot
Every desk sees price. None of them see the load.
You can price volatility and every factor exposure in the book. What you cannot see is the anatomy beneath it — whether stress is joined up, and whether the structure would contain a shock or spread it.
The instruments look backward
GARCH, realised vol, historical VaR — extrapolations from past returns that price what already happened. None measure the state of the system you hold now.
One number cannot hold it
Level gauges, vol indices, turbulence scores — every standard instrument compresses the whole market into a single number. By construction it cannot tell you whether stress is broad or narrow, contained or joined up — and that is the part that hurts you.
The state never reaches the desk
Convexity books pay carry through loaded and slack structures alike; dispersion books watch correlation only after it moves; allocators size off volatility that lags the state. Every one of those decisions hinges on a variable nobody hands you.
The Instrument
Every episode leaves an anatomy.
Altus reads the whole implied‑volatility surface and scores three coordinates daily — stress, sync, fragility — recording every episode on the same instrument. Two markets can print the same stress and be completely different events. The anatomy is what tells them apart.
Historical readings · descriptive only
Same stress, different event
The four episodes in the upper half all sat at the top of the stress range — a level gauge cannot tell them apart. What separates a market event from an expensive week in a handful of names is whether the stress joined up. The calm half is read the same way: an ordinary dispersed tape is a different market from one that is quiet but moving as one.
Crossings have dates
Markets don't drift across this plane. They cross it. You can say when the market entered a configuration and how long it has been there — a fact you can put in a note.
The cast rotates
The names carrying the stress this week are largely not the ones carrying it next week — which is exactly why a fixed watchlist stops working.
The third coordinate
Fragility has a score.
Beneath the plane sits the coordinate the others cannot give you: how the market's protection responds to a shock. Expression, E, is how hard it reprices when the index falls. Repair, R, is how much of that it gives back when the index rallies. Fragility, H = E − R, is what it keeps across the round trip — scored daily as a percentile against the market's own prior history, and read as high or low.
It moves on its own clock: a calm tape can carry a high fragility score, and vol will not tell you. It says nothing about timing — fragility describes how the market has been responding to shocks, not when the next one arrives.
Weekly Fragility Score readings, Jan 2023 – Jun 2026 · percentile against the prior three years · descriptive only
Read It For What It Is
Precision about the reading — and about its edges.
Altus measures a narrow set of things well, and is explicit about where the measurement ends. Knowing exactly what you are looking at is the discipline.
Altus is
- A measurement of the market's state — stress, sync, fragility — each read against its own history
- An episode register — every crossing dated, every anatomy comparable
- Continuous — a fresh, point-in-time reading every day
- Grounded in published complexity science
Altus is not
- A forecast of the next crash, or its date
- A trigger call — the anatomy says how a shock would travel, not when it lands
- A buy, sell, or position-sizing signal
- A black box fitted to past outcomes
The Method
The physics is published. We'll walk you through it.
Altus draws on self‑organized criticality — the statistical physics behind earthquakes, cascading failures, and systemic contagion — for its account of how stress builds endogenously inside a system. What Altus measures is the market's observable state: the stress priced across the names, how synced their repricing is, and the fragility of the structure carrying it. The science is public, and talking it through is our favourite part of the job. The tuning that turns it into a daily reading stays in‑house — and if you want to evaluate it in depth, we'll open it to you under NDA.
“Complex behavior in nature reflects the tendency of large systems with many components to evolve into a poised, ‘critical’ state, way out of balance, where minor disturbances may lead to events, called avalanches, of all sizes.”
Early Access · By Invitation
Opening the Terminal to a few desks.
We are admitting a small group of desks — convexity and tail‑risk funds, dispersion PMs, risk allocators. Thirty days, full access, no payment details. We want your honest read on whether this changes how you watch fragility.
Tell us what you manage and what you're looking for. We respond within 24 hours.