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Ever hear of the "Index of leading indicators"? Or maybe the "Producer price index", or the "Consumer price index". These are just some examples of a group of over 250 commonly used statistical series that comprise the Business Cycle Indicators. These indicators are used by a wide variety of people including investors, corporate analysts, traders, the Federal Reserve Board, and just about anyone who has an interest in trying to predict which way the U.S. economy is about to sway.
Business Cycle Indicators are a set of time series collected and published by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), a division of the Department of Commerce. Most of them are updated each month, and the remainder is updated quarterly. Each time series tracks some measure or activity that has been judged to be a significant component of the general economic equation. The purpose of the data series is to judge the performance of the economy; they are regularly used to forecast and verify cycles, upturns, downturns, peaks, and troughs in the US economy.
Many of the indicators have been categorized as Leading Indicators, Lagging Indicators, or Coincident Indicators in that certain changes in the indicator series happen before, after, or at the same time as similar of changes in the US economy.
Actually, the story is a bit more complex: Each of these indicators has been analyzed for it's relationship to "peaks", "troughs", and "turns" in the economy and has been categorized as leading, lagging, or coincident to each. Thus, for example the series that tracks the number of people unemployed is categorized as leading for peaks, lagging for troughs, and unpredictable for turns. The series that tracks corporate net cash flow, on the other hand, is categorized as leading for peaks, troughs, and turns.
The indicators fall into 16 distinct categories that cover the entire spectrum of business and economic activity.
There are basically three types of people who use the Business Cycle Indicators: those who want to know what's happening with the U.S. economy, those that want to know what is about to happen with the U.S. econony, and those those odd few who want to verify that what has happened with U.S. economy did in fact happen.
In other words it's people interested in the Past, the Present, and the Future of the economy.
Besides the Federal Reserve Board and those that have a healthy interest in economics, not many people track the BCI data because they care about the economy in general. Most of them don't even track specific indicators because they have any particular interest in the data represented by that indicator; instead they track the indicator because of a real (or, in some instances, perceived) relationship between another time series and the indicator.
Simply put, since the Business Cycle Indicators have shown to be reliable in predicting the behavior of the economy, many people use them to try and predict other things as well. While the government uses the BCI time series to help predict what the economy in general is about to do, many people use the BCI time series to help predict activity more relevant to them.
For example, many people analyze the BCI time series to see if historically there has been a similar correspondence between them and the value of specific stocks. The relationship between individual indicators and invidual stocks is unique, and while there may be a very strong predictive corellation between the behavior of one specific indicator and specific stock, there might be no correlation at all between that same indicator and a different stock.