Starts the moment your team forms — due Monday 21 Sep

Sprint 2 — vW2 — What Must You Do

Your team formed today. This is what happens between now and next Monday, and what you'll present when you come back.

The Sprint Goal

Produce and present a manual market intelligence snapshot as a team — no automation, no scripts, just done by hand.

This is deliberate. You'll feel exactly where the manual work gets repetitive and painful — that feeling is the reason automation gets introduced next, and it'll make far more sense once you've felt the problem it solves.

The Backlog — Four Things, By Hand

1Technical: SPX, NDX, 10-year yield, gold, Bitcoin, and all 11 sector ETFs

Track the weekly OHLC (open/high/low/close) for every one of these — not a subset:

SPX (S&P 500) and NDX (Nasdaq 100)
10-Year Treasury Yield
Gold and Bitcoin
All 11 sector ETFs: Technology (XLK), Financials (XLF), Energy (XLE), Health Care (XLV), Consumer Discretionary (XLY), Consumer Staples (XLP), Industrials (XLI), Materials (XLB), Utilities (XLU), Real Estate (XLRE), Communication Services (XLC)

Where to get this data — step by step:

Go to finance.yahoo.com — free, no account needed.
Type the ticker into the search bar at the top (e.g. ^GSPC for SPX, ^NDX for NDX, ^TNX for the 10-year yield, GC=F for gold, BTC-USD for Bitcoin, or the sector ETF ticker directly, e.g. XLK).
Click the correct result to open that instrument's page.
Click the "Historical Data" tab (near the top of the page, next to "Chart").
Set the date range to this week, then read off the Open, High, Low, and Close columns for each trading day.
Repeat for every ticker in the list above. Sixteen lookups total (5 index/asset tickers + 11 sector ETFs) — this is the actual manual pain the task is designed to make you feel.

DONE MEANS — a written record of weekly OHLC for all 16 instruments (SPX, NDX, 10-year yield, gold, Bitcoin, all 11 sector ETFs), sourced from Yahoo Finance or an equivalent site you name.

2Macro: three sectors' performance

Pick three of the sector ETFs you already pulled OHLC for in Task 1. For each, calculate its weekly % change (Friday close vs. last Friday's close), then compare that against SPX's weekly % change — the number you also already have. A sector "beat the market" if its % change is higher than SPX's, and "lagged" if lower.

DONE MEANS — three sectors, each with its weekly % change, SPX's weekly % change for comparison, and one sentence on whether it beat or lagged.

3Economic: three macro data points

Find three pieces of macroeconomic news or data released this week (Fed commentary, inflation data, jobs numbers, anything market-relevant) and note what each was and how markets reacted.

DONE MEANS — three data points, each with its date and the market's reaction in a sentence or two.

4Almanac: two calendar/seasonality notes

Using the Almanac Agent guide, find two seasonal or calendar-driven patterns relevant to this week (a monthly pattern, a specific day/week pattern, a sector seasonality window, an upcoming event). This is likely your first time reading an Almanac — the guide teaches you how.

DONE MEANS — two observations, each with the pattern, its historical strength, and why it's relevant this week.

Then: Write It Up and Present

Bring a short write-up of all four to Monday's session. Every team member should be able to speak to at least one part of it — this isn't a solo effort with everyone else riding along.

Use the Sprint Presentation Template (PowerPoint, downloadable). One slide per role — Sprint Goal, Almanac & Macro, Technical & Economic, Data & Calibration, Human Score & UI, LLM & GitHub — plus a retrospective slide at the end. Matches the six roles exactly, so nobody has to guess what goes where.

Presentation Order — Monday 21 Sep

Team 1 → Team 2 → Team 3 → Team 4 → Team 5, in that order. Each team presents everything above — expect roughly 5–8 minutes per team, adjusted live depending on time available. Order rotates in future sprints so the same team isn't always last.

Real deadline: Sunday night, not Monday morning. Everything above — the four tasks, your reports/vW2.md file, your slides — needs to be committed and ready by Sunday 20 Sep. Monday is presentation day, not build day. Nothing gets assembled live in class.

What Monday Actually Is

Two things happen in the same session: a Sprint Review of what you just did by hand (what you found, what was painful, what took too long), and Sprint 2 Planning for what comes next. The second half is introduced live — come having done the work, not having guessed what's coming.