Commentary

What’s Really Happening and How to Protect Your Portfolio Last Updated: October 27, 2025 (Day 24 of shutdown) The Bottom Line Up Front What you need to know in 60 seconds: The government shutdown is now in its 24th day, and it’s different from past shutdowns in one critical way: Food stamp benefits (SNAP) will […]

Executive Summary As the US government shutdown enters its 24th day, fund managers require a sophisticated analytical framework that properly identifies the primary market drivers. This analysis employs a hybrid approach: a 2×3 matrix capturing independent variables (duration × workforce impact), dynamic decision-tree triggers for tactical rebalancing, and regime-change assessment for strategic positioning. Critical Insight […]

1.Introduction In the three days following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs on April 2, 2025, dubbed “Liberation Day,” the U.S. stock market experienced a dramatic downturn, often referred to as the “Trump Tariff Tantrum.” (TTT) The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted over 2,200 points, with the S&P 500 dropping nearly 5% and the […]

Introduction The U.S. economy is highly interconnected with global markets, geopolitical events, and domestic policies. A variety of risks—ranging from international conflicts to domestic policy missteps—could negatively impact economic growth, potentially triggering a recession. Below is an analysis of the top geopolitical risks that could negatively impact the US economy and potentially lead to a […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]