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Plain-language explainers for every concept used in Analyst mode. No prior background assumed.
- Yield Curve — A chart of government bond interest rates plotted against how long until each bond matures.
- Consumer Price Index (CPI) — A monthly measure of how much prices for a typical basket of goods and services have changed.
- Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) Test — A statistical test for whether a time series wanders over time (non-stationary) or reverts to a stable pattern (stationary).
- Johansen Cointegration Test — Tests whether a group of wandering series still move together in a stable long-run relationship.
- Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) — A score used to pick how much history a forecasting model should look back at, balancing fit against complexity.
- Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) — Like AIC, but penalizes model complexity more heavily as the dataset grows, tending to pick simpler models.
- Bank of Canada Valet API — The Bank of Canada's free public API for historical interest rate, exchange rate, and bond yield data.
- Bond Yields — The annualized return you'd earn holding a bond, which moves inversely to the bond's price.
- 2-Year and 10-Year Government Bonds — The two Canadian government bond maturities whose yield gap this whole site is built around.
- How to Buy and Sell Bonds — Government bonds trade at auction and on a secondary market, mostly through brokers or funds rather than direct retail purchase.
- Fixed-Income Analysis — The practice of assessing bonds' risk and value using yields, spreads, duration, and macro context.
- Inflation — The rate at which prices rise and purchasing power falls, typically measured year-over-year via CPI.
- The Overnight Policy Rate — The interest rate the Bank of Canada sets for overnight loans between banks — its main policy lever.
- The USD/CAD Exchange Rate — How many Canadian dollars it takes to buy one US dollar — sensitive to interest-rate differentials between the two countries.
- Monetary Policy — The central bank's use of interest rates (and other tools) to manage inflation and economic growth.