Doug Short Advisor Perspectives

[unable to retrieve full-text content] What does the ratio of unemployment claims tell us about where we are in the business cycle and our current recession risk? At present, the ratio for Continued Claims has been trending down.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] This commentary has been updated to include Friday morning's release of Nonfarm Employment. November's 266K increase in total nonfarm payrolls had revisions that resulted in 41K more jobs than previously reported. The Investing.com consensus was for 186K new jobs and the unemployment rate to remain at 3.6%.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] This morning's release of the publicly available data from ECRI puts its Weekly Leading Index (WLI) at 147.8, up 1.0 from the previous week. Year-over-year the four-week moving average of the indicator is now at 1.34%, up from last week. The WLI Growth indicator is now at 2.40, up from the previous week.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] TThe December Preliminary came in at 99.2, up 2.4 from the November Final reading. Investing.com had forecast 97.0.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] This morning's employment report for November showed a 266K increase in total nonfarm payrolls, which was above the Investing.com forecast of 186K.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] The moving average for the per-capita Light Vehicle Sales series peaked in 1986. Thirty-plus years later, it is now down 30.0% from that 1986 peak.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] The U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services, also known as the FT-900, is published monthly by the Bureau of Economic Analysis with data going back to 199 and details U.S. exports and imports of goods and services. Today's headline number of -47.20B was slightly higher than the Investing.com forecast of -48.70B.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] This morning's seasonally adjusted 203K new claims, down 10K from the previous week's unrevised figure, was better than the Investing.com forecast of 215K.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] In this morning's ADP employment report we got the November estimate of 67K new nonfarm private employment jobs from ADP, a decrease over October's revised 121K. The popular spin on this indicator is as a preview to the monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] Here's the latest on the three largest cryptocurrencies by market share: bitcoin, Ether, and Ripple.