February | 2016 | RecessionAlert

Archive | February, 2016

A U.S Weekly Leading Economic Index

By RecessionALERT on February 23, 2016 in Research Papers

RecessionALERT.com has constructed a Weekly Leading Economic Index (WLEI) for the U.S Economy that draws from over 20 weekly time-series from the following broad categories Corporate Bond Market Composite Treasury Bond Market Composite Stock Market Composite Labor Market Composite Credit Market Composite Mortgage backed securities (MBS) The first five are shown below: Being a weekly growth index, it provides data with at most a 1-week lag, which is far timelier than the lag found on monthly economic indicators. Additionally, it […]

Read full story · Comments are closed

Risk of U.S Economic Recession

By RecessionALERT on February 3, 2016 in Reflections

A raft of analysts, perma-bears and bloggers are playing fast and loose with the R-word again. This is likely to reach a crescendo with the release today of the unexpected large drop in the ISM non-manufacturing survey. We recall a time in late 2011 when the mainstream perception was that we were headed for recession and we posted a widely read article that went against the mainstream, and attracted attention of some respected names: Given the amount of attention looming […]

Read full story · Comments are closed

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMERS: Although many of our models rely heavily on back-testing, optimisation and probability methods, please note that past performance is NO GUARANTEE for future returns. No system devised by man can predict the future, let alone the future of the markets and economies. What we have are sets of mathematical models that use historical data and varying theories to pinpoint places in time when the STATISTICAL LIKELYHOOD of calling the start and end to recessions is the greatest. In the midst of all the best mathematical models, you can have geo-political events, wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters and even nuclear accidents that tip everything upside down. This is always a risk factor you need to factor in on any recession call no matter how confident you are in a signal. The SuperIndexes are created through mathematical and statistical optimisation techniques that best fit the historical NBER data. There is no guarantee that out-of-sample performance will match that of prior in-sample performance.