Is a recession just around the corner?

Preface: Explaining our market timing models
We maintain several market timing models, each with differing time horizons. The “Ultimate Market Timing Model” is a long-term market timing model based on the research outlined in our post, Building the ultimate market timing model. This model tends to generate only a handful of signals each decade.

The Trend Model is an asset allocation model which applies trend following principles based on the inputs of global stock and commodity price. This model has a shorter time horizon and tends to turn over about 4-6 times a year. In essence, it seeks to answer the question, “Is the trend in the global economy expansion (bullish) or contraction (bearish)?”

My inner trader uses the trading component of the Trend Model to look for changes in direction of the main Trend Model signal. A bullish Trend Model signal that gets less bullish is a trading “sell” signal. Conversely, a bearish Trend Model signal that gets less bearish is a trading “buy” signal. The history of actual out-of-sample (not backtested) signals of the trading model are shown by the arrows in the chart below. Past trading of the trading model has shown turnover rates of about 200% per month.

The latest signals of each model are as follows:

• Ultimate market timing model: Buy equities*
• Trend Model signal: Risk-on*
• Trading model: Bullish*

The performance chart and model readings have been delayed by a week out of respect to our paying subscribers.

Update schedule: I generally update model readings on my site on weekends and tweet any changes during the week at @humblestudent. Subscribers will also receive email notices of any changes in my trading portfolio.

My answer to Northy
Recently, a lot of US macro economic releases has been coming in a bit on the soft side. As the chart below shows, stock prices have a high degree of correlation with the Citigroup Economic Surprise Index, which measures whether economic data is beating or missing expectations.

As a result, I am sensing a heightened level of anxiety among some of my readers. I have received several requests for comments to the macro post written by Sven Henrich, otherwise known as Northman Trader (Northy). In his post, Time to get real, Part II, Northy laid out the macro view for an impending recession. He correctly pointed out that recessions, which are bull market killers, often occur during the first year of a presidential term. So, with macro data weakening, is a recession just around the corner?

In conjunction to my response to Northy’s recessionary post, I thought that it would also be timely to review the message from my Recession Watch indicators.

The full post can be found at our new site here.