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 determining when an economy has entered a recession. It is useful in real-time evaluation of the business cycle and relies on monthly unemployment data from […]

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 these models in live market environments, and feedback from clients, has allowed us to develop a 2nd generation of these models. Although they only currently […]

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 rate Treasury notes would pay investors if they bought them today. The U.S. government partially funds itself by issuing 10-year Treasury notes. The U.S. Treasury […]

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 fifteen diversified recession models are combined into a Diffusion representing how many of them are in their respective recession territories, to form the Recession Forecasting […]

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 posited that during significant market declines, panic would manifest itself as one or more days when declining stocks exceeded advancing stocks by more than 9-to-1 […]

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 Reserve to measure value of the U.S. dollar, based on its competitiveness versus U.S trading partners. The index gives importance to currencies most widely used in […]

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 consist of the following components: A set of short, medium and longer-term trailing stops for both longs (uptrends) and shorts (downtrends) Corresponding probabilities of a […]

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 methods to derive 1-year ahead forecasts for the Sp500 with correlations (r-squares) of 0.27, 0.34 and 0.43 respectively. In PART-3 we use the data from […]

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 are high, allowing you to mitigate downside risk. If you recall, we opined that experience has shown us that detecting market tops is far harder […]

Since the bull market that commenced in 2009 there have been around 10 major rapid advances in the SP-500 that ended in not-insignificant market tops. In our ZOOM calls with clients over the last year, a lot of interest has been expressed in how to detect for preemptive warning signs of these major tops. By pre-emptive we mean warnings that are issued before any significant declines set in. A problem with many traditional technical SELL models is that conditions or […]

In PART-1 we looked at how we used the RAVI to determine 10-year ahead forecasts on the SP500 Total Return Index 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 are going to focus solely on how we derive 1-year ahead forecasts for the Sp500. 2. Deriving 1-year SP-500 forecasts Using the RAVI index regressed to 1-year ahead SP500 […]