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Results from a Private Survey of the Employment Situation: January 2020
The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release data from its Employment Situation Report tomorrow morning. Giller Investments operates as private consumer survey that we base proprietary trading strategies on. We are happy to share the results we have for Consumer Sentiment and Expectations. Full details in the press release here and you may subscribe to receive this data by email here. The data comparable to the public numbers is highlighted in yellow and the range that the public release lay within historically is highlighted in blue.
The January numbers always make me nervous because the seasonal adjustment is large and, because of the way the BLS works, it is not knowable ex ante.
Specifically all data up to and including the the most recent are used to compute the seasonal adjustment to all of the data including the data point to be released.
Because my surveys have been running for substantially less time than the BLS’s (their data starts in 1939, mine in 2019) I cannot perform the seasonal adjustment they do (currently the X13-ARIMA-SEATS methodology). Instead, I have to predict the seasonal adjustment necessary. I’m confortable with the methodology I use to do that but, nevertheless, the large corrections in January is a possible source of tracking error.
