About RecessionALERT

Dwaine has a Bachelor of Science (BSc Hons) university degree majoring in computer science, math & statistics and is a full-time trader and investor. His passion for numbers and keen research & analytic ability has helped grow RecessionALERT into a company used by hundreds of hedge funds, brokerage firms and financial advisers around the world.
Author Archive | RecessionALERT

What Global Slowdown?

Global Slowdown? What Global Slowdown? We can’t see it. Maybe we are blind. Total world economic activity as measured from the average of world trade volumes and industrial production, saw a soft landing but is clearly on an upward trajectory: World trade volumes (average of imports and exports) in particular are showing strong growth, emerging […]

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New Optimum Market timing Page

All the OPTIMUM brand of SP-500 market timing models have been moved under a new page and menu item at https://recessionalert.com/pro-optimum/ These models span various time horizons and have explicit entry/exit rules used in their back testing that can easily be replicated by subscribers into the future.  They are defined as Macro models that work […]

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Upcoming FED rate cuts? Not so fast!

The official data the National Bureau of Economic Research (the arbiters of U.S recession declarations, also known as NBER) are looking at to determine the coincident (current) status of the U.S economy, shows the economy may be slowing, but its not down or even OUT yet: It is hard to imagine the FED are not […]

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Complacency about personal finances, stock-market & economy has bottomed.

Composites created from U.S geography limited internet searches for 8 search-terms we have found most aligned to uncertainty and fear regarding personal finances, the stock market and the economy have bottomed and appear to be on the rise: Both the equal-weighted composite and our preferred measure, the “search-volume weighted” composite bottomed in January 2024. This […]

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A leading indicator for U.S stocks

The most powerful leading indicators we have found for U.S stocks over the medium-term horizon are the net percentage of 39 OECD countries with rising leading economic indices (LEI’s) and the net percentage of 39 central banks that are easing rates. They achieve maximum correlation with the NYSE annual percentage change with 7 and 10 […]

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What if we adjusted U.S GDP to account for record “war-time” budget deficits?

NOTE : this is a very simplistic thought experiment, as determining recessions are usually much more multidimensional , nuanced affairs. Its also debatable whether deficits do indeed artificially prop up the economy or not, or even if they are bad or not. There are also potential multiplier effects with budget deficits that are not taken […]

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The SAHM Rule Redux

0.Change log 26 Sept 2024 : New Section-13 added to include “Job Losers” Sahm version. New Section-14 added “Performance summary” 28 Aug 2024  : New Section-6 added to include “Cycle Low” Sahm version.  1.Introduction In macroeconomics, the Sahm rule, or Sahm rule recession indicator, is a heuristic measure by the United States’ Federal Reserve for […]

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Understanding SP500 Gen2 Persistent Current Trend (PCT) probability model

Background The Gen2 probability model we maintain for PRO subscribers for the SP500 provides for short, medium, long-term and macro-term probabilities of market troughs/peaks. It does this by examining current up/down trends across the 4 time-horizons mentioned and compares them to a 30-year historical record of said trends with regards to both duration of trend […]

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Update on US & Global Economy

Despite all the traditional leading indicators warning of recession for some time now, the US economy seems “robust” with unemployment stubbornly making new lows. We touched on the suspected reasons for this in our public note “The Delayed Recession” which offers the most plausible reasoning for this. However, if we dig a little deeper under […]

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The Delayed Recession

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a short while back that US national unemployment rate was 3.8% in August and September, versus the lows of 3.4% witnessed in both January and April 2023. On the surface, the employment situation looks healthy. Against the backdrop of virtually every leading indicator warning of recession (for quite […]

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Generation-2 Market Probability Models

For many years now, we have provided multifactor trough/peak probability models for subscribers for SP500, QQQ (Nasdaq-100), GLD (Gold), IWM (small-caps), BTC (Bitcoin), AGG (Bond market), VTI (Total market), EFA (Developed markets ex U.S & Canada), EEM (Emerging markets) and IJH (mid-caps). You can read about their methodology in this research note. Running and using […]

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US 10-Year T-Note Probability Model

Introduction The 10-year Treasury note is a debt obligation issued by the United States government with a maturity of 10 years upon initial issuance. A 10-year Treasury note pays interest at a fixed rate once every six months and pays the face value to the holder at maturity. The 10-year Treasury yield is the current […]

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A Recession Forecasting Diffusion (RFD)

Since we originally designed and built the Weekly SuperIndex recession model, we have created fourteen other quantitative recession models for clients over the last decade. These range from broad-based short, medium, and long-term composite leading & coincident economic indicators to composites focused on Housing, Labor, Gross Domestic Product & Income and Valuations. Each of these […]

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The Lowry buy-the-dip Indicator

On 26th February 2002, Paul F. Desmond from Lowry’s Research published a seminal paper titled “Identifying Bear Market Bottoms & New Bull Markets” (  download) This concept measured market breadth, namely daily advancing stocks as a % of advancing and declining stocks as well as points gained as a % of points gained and lost. The research […]

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Valuing Bitcoin using US$ Index

Of the dozen indicators and metrics we have researched, the fortunes of the US Trade-Weighted U.S Dollar Index (TWDI) has the biggest impact on Bitcoin USD prices. When the TWDI depreciates, this boosts Bitcoin prices strongly. When the TWDI becomes stronger, Bitcoin prices face significant headwinds.  The TWDI is a weekly index created by the U.S Federal […]

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Trendex Market Timing/Risk Management

1. Introduction The Trendex indicators are a suite of proprietary short, medium and long term market timing trailing stops with accompanying market peak & bottom probabilities to allow market participants to minimize as well as assess risk or opportunity for nine of the most popular U.S ETF’s commonly used in diversified portfolios. The Trendex indicators […]

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Relationship between stocks & FED balance sheet

The chart below shows the size of securities held outright by the US Federal Reserve versus Wilshire Total market index as stock market proxy. We see the various quantitative easing programs that propelled the stock market higher including the massive Covid19 liquidity injection that set stocks on a never-before-seen trajectory On the surface it appears […]

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High-Frequency U.S. Economic Data Shows 3-Speed Recovery

Since the onset of Covid-19, there has been a lot of research (and release) of alternative (non traditional) high-frequency data to measure the extent of the economic collapse brought on by coronavirus lockdowns, as well as to measure the post-lockdown economic recovery. Think of Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and SafeGraph geolocation data to track movement of people around […]

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Quantifying market valuation risk – PART 3

In PART-1 we looked at how we used the RecessionALERT Valuation Index (RAVI) to determine 10-year ahead forecasts on the SP500 Total Return Index (TRI) with a better than 0.89 correlation, and how we managed to derive 5,3 and 2 year ahead SP500 forecasts with correlations of 0.8, 0.68 and 0.55 respectively. In PART-2 we examined three […]

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Detecting SP500 BUY-THE-DIP signals

In our prior research note “Detecting tops of rapid SP500 advances” we introduced a multi-factor model (BIGTOP, available now in the Dashboard) for signaling advance warning of major (infrequent) intra-bull SP500 stock market tops. Whilst not a precise actionable signaling tool, BIGTOP appears very good at warning you of when risks of major market tops […]

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  GLOBAL SLOWDOWN? SEE LATEST MARKET COMMENTARY