NQV isn't a signal telling you to do something. It's a way of describing what kind of environment the market happens to be in right now — a more modest job, and a different one.
One of the tools we reference throughout VESTFY™ is NQV, short for Nasdaq Quotient Velocity, and it's worth being precise about what it actually is, because tools like this get misread as something they're not almost by default. NQV is simply the ratio of TQQQ's daily closing price to QQQ's daily closing price. That's the entire construction — one closing number divided by another, tracked through time.
What makes the ratio worth watching is what it reflects. TQQQ is a leveraged product built to deliver a multiple of the daily move in the same underlying index QQQ tracks. Because of how leverage compounds over time, the relationship between the two funds doesn't hold steady. It shifts depending on the character of the recent market, and that shift is why the ratio carries information — it's the reason we look at it at all.
We call NQV a regime indicator, and we choose that word deliberately. A regime describes the kind of environment the market has recently been in — broadly, whether conditions have leaned risk-on or risk-off. It's a description of state, an account of what has already been happening, not a forecast of what happens next. That distinction is the whole point, and we hold to it on purpose.
It's worth stating plainly what NQV is not. It is not a buy or sell signal. It doesn't mark entry points or exit points. It doesn't tell anyone that some threshold has been crossed at which action is warranted. It doesn't assign probabilities to future price moves or predict where anything is headed. Using it any of those ways would misrepresent what the ratio is and what it can support, and we never frame it that way, because doing so would be both inaccurate and beyond what general market education should claim.
We resist those framings for more than regulatory caution, though we take that seriously too. They would simply be dishonest about what the tool is. A ratio built from two closing prices describes a relationship that has already existed; it holds no knowledge of the future, and presenting it otherwise would be a claim we can't back up. The modesty of the description isn't a limitation we're apologizing for — it's an accurate account of what the tool can and can't do.
What NQV can offer is context. An investor trying to understand the character of the current environment, rather than reacting to whatever headline crossed the wire that morning, may find value in a description of market state grounded in observable prices instead of sentiment or narrative. That's what NQV provides. Knowing whether the recent environment has leaned risk-on or risk-off is useful context, even though it stops well short of telling anyone what to actually do.
We build NQV on daily closing prices rather than intraday movement, and that's a deliberate design choice. Intraday data would introduce the noise of leverage decay and short-term wiggle without adding anything to the description of regime, and it would push the tool toward looking like a short-term trading signal — precisely what it isn't. Sticking to daily closes keeps the tool aligned with its actual job: describing environment over periods long enough to mean something.
The principle behind this extends past this one ratio. Across VESTFY™, we're consistently more interested in describing where things stand than in predicting where they're going or telling anyone what to do about it. A description of regime helps an investor understand their present position; it makes no claim to know the destination, and it issues no instructions. That line, between describing and instructing, is one we hold everywhere we publish — NQV is simply the clearest single example of it.