Thursday, January 19, 2012

Beta testing the Shadow Weekly Leading Index (week 2)

- by New Deal democrat

As readers know, I am trying to reverse engineer the ECRI Weekly Leading Index.

Research has revealed that the WLI (per Lakshman Achuthan) has 7 components. We know that two are initial jobless claims and the JoC-ECRI commodity index. Six of the seven are public record.

Since the possible early monthly reports were out last week, they wouldn't count in any event. Unfortunately, I don't have time to be as thorough as I would normally like, but ALL of the 6 public weekly components (with the possible exception of the rate of growth of real estate loans, I haven't had time to check) were positive this week:

DJ Bond Avg up
S&P 500 up
Initial Jobless claims*: down over 40,000
Commodity price changes: up
Purchase Mortgage applications: up
10 year treasury - BAA credit spread*: down

The predicted week over week change is therefore predicted to be positive.

[*Note: these are inverse relationships, so the higher the number, the lower the growth score]

We'll have an answer tomorrow.