Commentary

We post occasional thoughts and interesting observations about our U.S recession forecasting methodologies on this blog. To see all the posts on a single page, click here.

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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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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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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A new coronavirus wave is starting in USA

One of the most accurate and reliable leading indicators we have discovered for the U.S daily new Coronavirus infections curve is the percentage of 52 US states that have an increasing or decreasing rate of new daily infections being reported. This indicator tops out before the national US infection tally and likewise bottoms before the […]

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Launch of Institutional Crypto Advisory

After hundreds of client Zoom consultations over the last 6 months, the request for a fundamentally-driven macro-risk model for cryptocurrency (specifically Bitcoin), similar to the ones we provide for the US economy and SP500, was one of the many topics topics among just under 49% of the calls. The request was highest among high net-worth […]

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Stage is set for stock market gains in November

The SP500 has put in a 7.4% peak-to-trough correction since 12 October. In the last 20 years, according to our SP500 probability model, corrections of more than this magnitude have occurred only 11.4% of the time, hinting at a 88.6% probability the worst is over. The SP500 has also put in lower weekly closes 3 […]

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A new, bigger U.S Coronavirus peak now likely

For a while, it seemed we had tamed the coronavirus epidemic in the US. But new daily cases are on the 3rd surge since the epidemic hit US shores: The U.S lags most of Europe’s ‘  countries by about 4-6 weeks on the coronavirus curve. When we saw the infections picking up in Europe after […]

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Coronavirus Recession likely ended in June

In this exercise, we examine the current behavior of various of our US leading economic indexes to past history to determine a likely recession exit date. The charts we display below are automatically displayed (depending on your selections) in the monthly data file Analysis Tool that is published for PRO subscribers, and can be found […]

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Summary of Service Additions & Improvements

We wish to highlight the following recent additions and improvements since April 2019, to our subscriber deliverables, as well as highlight some older features you may not be aware of. 1.Alerts archive Many subscribers do not know that you can access a multi-year chronological archive of end-of-day alerts from the REPORTS>ALERTS tab. 2. Stock Market […]

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US Economic Recovery update

NOTE : All the charts displayed below are updated daily/weekly and available for subscribers from the various chart menus. Since the peak daily infection rate of over 75,000 achieved on 17 July 2020, daily infections fell consistently to a trough of just over 20,000 on 8 September 2020. During this period, US national economic mobility […]

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Global Business Mobility remains in decline

Global Business Mobility, defined as GDP-weighted Google geolocation data of workplace less residential mobility for the 24 largest economies in the world, representing over two-thirds of global GDP, remains in decline despite a recent uptick: When excluding USA from the data, the situation appears even worse, as depicted by the second chart above showing steeper […]

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Global V-shaped recovery stopped in its tracks

The US State and G8 Mobility Charts have just been updated in the Covid menu. The U.S has seen a whopping increase in infections across a broad swathe of states since emerging from lockdown : As a result, US and state economic mobility has taken a huge hit. Although the US is only about 49% […]

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