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.

Relationship between stocks & FED balance sheet

By on June 17, 2021 in Reflections

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

By on June 8, 2021 in Reflections

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

By on February 25, 2021 in Reflections

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

By on February 16, 2021 in Reflections

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

By on November 3, 2020 in Reflections

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

By on October 20, 2020 in Reflections

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

By on October 12, 2020 in Reflections

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

By on September 30, 2020 in Reflections

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

By on September 23, 2020 in Reflections

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

By on August 27, 2020 in Reflections

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

By on July 21, 2020 in Reflections

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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Headwinds increasing for the stock market

By on July 10, 2020 in Reflections

NOTE : All images and charts displayed below are regularly updated and available to subscribers from the CHARTS menu. The SP-500 has enjoyed an incredible 40% rally since the 23 March lows. This was mostly fueled by an unprecedented FED stimulus program, which is now coming to an end within the next few weeks: Unless […]

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US enters 2nd wave of Covid19 infections

By on June 26, 2020 in Reflections

Note : Most charts shown below are available to subscribers in the COVID19 analytics section. Summary Economic mobility in US increasing at a slower pace than Covid-19 infections, contrary to rest of G7. At a state level, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts & Michigan are leading economic mobility recovery vs infections. US has moved from […]

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NBER declares 2020 recession dates

By on June 12, 2020 in Reflections

The National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER) has announced official start dates for the 2020 US recession. It is very rare for such quick pronouncements (they are normally made 9-12 months after the fact) but the fact that 90% of the economy came to a sudden halt, has led to such deep declines in their […]

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Some updates & market observations

By on May 11, 2020 in Reflections

The STM Seasonality Model is a unique composite that looks at average monthly gains, gain-to-loss ratios and percentage of winning months for 1,2,3 and 4 year cycles to arrive at a composite seasonality score for each month. For the last 18 months, the model has been running at 80% directional accuracy on calls on the […]

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SP-500 and Recessions

By on April 29, 2020 in Reflections

We examined SP-500 behavior in the lead to and during US recessions a few years ago in an old research note (Recession – Just how much warning is useful anyway?) to conclude that more than 5-months warning before a recession was not constructive, and that you should focus on recession warning models that stuck to […]

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COVID19 Recession Warning

By on March 26, 2020 in Reflections

Businesses are going to be shuttered in massive numbers as the U.S has to deal with the unavoidable nationwide lock-down that will be required to contain the highly contagious Coronavirus. From our Covid19 Dashboard we maintain for our subscribers, we can see that the number of cases is rising according to a quadratic equation that […]

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COVID-19 Global Pandemic is here

By on March 12, 2020 in Reflections

Further to our March 5th 2020 warning on a looming Coronavirus (COVID19)  global pandemic, the WHO has finally recognized as such and declared the outbreak an official global pandemic. It is not hard to see why, when one looks at the chart below: Whilst China has managed to stabilize new infections (assuming their numbers are […]

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COVID-19 starting to look like a global pandemic

By on March 5, 2020 in Reflections

The newly reported cases of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) in China appear to be tapering off, but it is the recent uptick of newly reported cases outside China that have reached alarming levels, resulting in total cases accelerating to just under 100,000: The secondary round of infections, most likely from travelers from China before the largest […]

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Massive rebound in US housing market

By on February 12, 2020 in Reflections

All 8 components of our comprehensive US Housing Market Index have posted solid and sustained gains in the last 6 months: Our detailed PDF report for Dec 2019 has been published to the REPORTS menu. According to many market watchers, there is no better barometer on the health of the U.S. economy than housing. It’s […]

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