recession forecasting accuracy

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Judging Recession Forecasting Accuracy

By RecessionALERT on September 20, 2012 in Reflections

In August 2011, ECRI declared a recession was upon us. If you spend enough time examining their initial proclamations it was literally that a recession was imminent, saying “It’s either just begun, or it’s right in front of us.” Subsequently they revised their call, saying the recession would hit “by mid year” 2012. At that time an array of proprietary leading indicators were in contagion. Hussman and others followed suit with bearish outlooks. In January 2012 we said we couldn’t see it. The general response from the […]

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IMPORTANT DISCLAIMERS: Although many of our models rely heavily on back-testing, optimisation and probability methods, please note that past performance is NO GUARANTEE for future returns. No system devised by man can predict the future, let alone the future of the markets and economies. What we have are sets of mathematical models that use historical data and varying theories to pinpoint places in time when the STATISTICAL LIKELYHOOD of calling the start and end to recessions is the greatest. In the midst of all the best mathematical models, you can have geo-political events, wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters and even nuclear accidents that tip everything upside down. This is always a risk factor you need to factor in on any recession call no matter how confident you are in a signal. The SuperIndexes are created through mathematical and statistical optimisation techniques that best fit the historical NBER data. There is no guarantee that out-of-sample performance will match that of prior in-sample performance.