The three alarms of August 2015 — and the bottom that wasn't the bottom

Marquee

The extreme

In August 2015, the Radar recorded something rare: all three of the house's alarms went off at once. Domestic risk appetite collapsed to the absolute floor of the scale, and the intermarket structure crossed into the most acute form of aversion. Behind the number, three macro pressures broke their own historical edges at the same time — the exchange rate, public debt and fiscal tension. In numbers: the Perene Risk Index from 79.1 to 0.0, the intermarket from 21.3 to 14.6, the dollar at R$ 3.51 and debt at 62.97% of GDP.

What happened next

Aversion did not pull back — it deepened first. In November 2015, three months later, the intermarket fell even further, from 20.6 to 12.2, with capital abandoning commodities and rushing into what pays regardless of the economy (Utilities at the highest point of the reading). Only in February 2016 did a surface thaw arrive: the intermarket climbed off the floor to 22.4 — still in strong aversion. And it took nearly a year: in August 2016 the structure returned to neutral ground (50.1), with sector leadership changing hands.

What didn't happen

The August 2015 extreme was not the bottom. Anyone reading the floor of the scale as "there's nowhere left to fall" would have been wrong: November was worse. The Selic brought no relief either — it stayed pinned at 14.25% a year for the whole year. And the dollar did not reverse right away: it went from R$ 3.51 to R$ 3.78 before easing. Normalization was not a leap; it was a year.

Honest verdict

The reading of extreme aversion got the regime right, but not the timing. The bottom of an indicator is not the bottom of the cycle: maximum aversion marks the start of a process, rarely the end of a fall.

Continue the story: The bottom that wasn't the bottom · The 2016 bottom — who bought while mood screamed · The dollar as a regime gauge →

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Characters: Flow (risk appetite) · Structure (intermarket) · Dollar · Rates (Selic)