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About

What is World Tension Meter?

An independent, fully automated geopolitical risk index — free to use, updated continuously, no account required.

Our mission

World Tension Meter exists to answer a simple question that is surprisingly hard to answer: how tense is the world right now, and what does that mean for inflation and global markets?

Geopolitical events — wars, sanctions, energy supply disruptions, trade conflicts — are among the most powerful drivers of inflation. Yet most inflation trackers only look backwards at CPI data. We track the leading indicators: the events and signals that drive inflation before it shows up in official statistics.

Our composite index aggregates five independently measured real-time signals — conflict intensity, energy stress, trade disruption, financial volatility, and media sentiment — updated twice daily using publicly available data. The result is a single number from 0 to 100 that reflects the current level of geopolitical stress, instantly and without a paywall.

What we offer — all live now

🌍 World Tension Score
Live 0–100 composite geopolitical risk index. 5-signal weighted model with half-life event memory. Updated at 00:00 & 12:00 UTC daily.
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🥇 Gold & Silver Index
Separate safe-haven demand scores for gold and silver — price momentum, yield correlation, VIX-based haven demand. Updated every 5 minutes.
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₿ Crypto Fear & Greed
Independent Bitcoin and Ethereum sentiment scores using price momentum, dominance, and market sentiment data from CoinGecko.
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📰 News Pulse
Live geopolitical news ranked by tension score from 12 RSS sources. Extreme and high-tension articles pinned for 24 hours so context is never lost.
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📊 2026 History
Complete daily score history for 2026 with chart, monthly breakdown, and statistics. Dataset available as open JSON.
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📖 Analysis
16 in-depth articles on geopolitical risk, inflation mechanics, asset behaviour during crises, and how to interpret the WTM score.
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How we are different

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Fully automated — no editorial bias
Every score is calculated entirely by algorithm from publicly available data. No human curates what counts as "tension." The same formula runs every day regardless of which political events are in the news.
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Event memory — history doesn't vanish overnight
Major events are stored with a variable half-life decay. A war detected today still contributes to the score 60 days from now. The Ukraine invasion baseline is still factored in years later. Most daily indexes reset to zero overnight — ours retains institutional memory.
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Multi-signal — not just news sentiment
Unlike indexes that measure only media fear, we combine five independent signals: actual commodity prices (oil, gold), bond market expectations (10Y yield), equity fear (VIX), currency stress (DXY), and media sentiment. Five signals that cannot all simultaneously spike without a genuine global crisis.
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Free, open, no account required
Institutional geopolitical risk tools (BlackRock BGRI, Caldara-Iacoviello GPR Index, Amundi GST) are built for professional investors and cost thousands per year. We believe this information should be accessible to everyone. All data, scores, and history are free to view and use.

Transparency & independence

World Tension Meter is an independent informational platform with no affiliation to any government, financial institution, military organization, or news outlet. We do not receive funding from any entity with a stake in how geopolitical tensions are perceived or reported.

All data is sourced from publicly available APIs (Federal Reserve FRED, Yahoo Finance, Alpha Vantage, CoinGecko) and free RSS feeds from major international news sources. Our complete methodology — every formula, every weight, every threshold — is documented on the Methodology page. The scoring code runs on a standard cron schedule with no manual intervention.

The historical dataset for 2026 is published openly at /api/scores.json under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. You are free to use, share, and build on the data with attribution.

Contact & feedback

We read every email. For methodology questions, data corrections, feature suggestions, or media enquiries, contact us at worldtmeter@gmail.com. If you notice a score that seems wrong or a data source issue, please report it — we take data integrity seriously.

World Tension Meter is an independent informational platform. Nothing on this site constitutes financial, investment, or geopolitical advice. All scores are automated outputs based on public data. Methodology is subject to ongoing improvement.