Sunday, July 27, 2008

Equally Weighted Leading Economic Indicators

The factor weights for the Conference Board’s Leading Economic Indicators

were revised effective on the release for April 2008, and all historical values for the three composite indexes were revised at this time to reflect the changes. (Under normal circumstances, updates to the leading, coincident, and lagging indexes only incorporate revisions to data over the past six months.) The factors for the leading index were calculated using 1984-2006 as the sample period for measuring volatility. A separate set of factors for the 1959-1983 period is available upon request.

Using these historical factors, the year over year LEI was a recession indicating –2.0%.

To create the EWLEI Index, I simply revised the weightings of each indicator to 10% of the total. The UGLY results are below.


Equal weighting shows a decline of 8.2% year over year and a negative index starting all the way back in 2006.


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