Dear New World Investor:
In the June 11 Radar Report I outraged some of you and, in a June 15 article based on that Radar Report, outraged almost everyone on SeekingAlpha.com, with my statement that: “The recession is over.” I said you should not pay attention to the lagging indicators like employment, especially when cited by an otherwise bearish stock market forecaster as a reason the rally was a fake, manipulated, engineered by the evildoers on Wall Street, etc.
In my follow-up in the June 25 Radar Report I pointed out that the strength in the leading indicators and the coincident/lagging indicator confirmed that the recession ended in June. When I posted that as an article on SeekingAlpha.com on July 7, the howling doubled. No one actually said: “Off with his head!” But it was close.
So, in the spirit of “I never forget a mistake, that way I can make it over and over” I decided to cover the third group of economic indicators published by The Conference Board: The Coincident Economic Index. This is a bit trickier, because while the leaders turn up before the economy turns up, the coincidents are, well, coincident. So I had to forecast what the four components of the Coincident Index will look like for July, August and September in order to be sure the recession ended in June. I did that, and as my teen-age babysitter would text:
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