Advance Real Retail and Food Services Sales (RRSFS)
and
Industrial Production: Total Index (INDPRO)

These very lagging indicators will tell you there was a recession after we can all see it in the rear view mirror. The market is a leading indicator, and it's screaming Recession!

Elan

Above was Elan's comment to Rayvt regarding turning off timing if no recession is indicated. I thought I would look at the Conference Board's Leading Economic Indicator to see if it was any help in turning off timing. I wasn't able to find anything, but perhaps others may have better luck.

The LEI is issued in about the 3rd week of the month and it constantly revises previous months. Some sites list the value, but they list the revised values so you have no way of knowing what was actually known on the day of the release. I went back and pulled all the press release back to 2001. If anyone is interested, I can send a file. It has either the current month and 3 previous months, or current month plus previous 2 months data plus the difference between current month and 6 months ago. The conference Board says that a recession is likely if the LEI declines by 2.1 over the previous 6 months and the diffusion index is 50 or less. I looked at 6 month changes and 1 and 2 month changes using QQQ or SPY with a 200d moving average check.

Send me an email if you would like a copy of the data that was obtained from these two sources.

prnewswire.com - The conference board

conference-board.org: PDF document

Aussi