Hi Folks.
Welcome to the year end/ year beginning Econ Forecast. Thanks to the second week of mid-week holidays, it's a short one.
MONDAY: Surprisingly small calendar today (and tomorrow) considering the day before a holiday they usually jam two days worth of numbers into one day. 9:45 a.m. is Chicago PMI, which traders don't even know exists by the continual lack of price action every time this one drops, and at 10:00 a.m. is Pending Home Sales. Like all other real estate numbers the market ignores this one as well thanks to the knowledge from the head of the National Board of Realtors (or something close to it) that they basically make up these numbers (this happened during the 2008-2010 housing meltdown when traders were actually glued to their screens when housing numbers came out...finding out they were basically fantasy killed the entire group of numbers as a trade signal).
TUESDAY: So after my little walk down Memory Lane regarding housing numbers, today we have two more at 10:00 a.m. S&P/CS Composite-20 Housing Price Index y/y and the Housing Price Index m/m. Given no one cares about housing numbers any longer and it's New Year's Eve, I think you can safely ignore these today. And that's it. We close 2024 with a pair of lousy housing numbers.
WEDNESDAY: Happy New Year. Enjoy the day off.
THURSDAY: Since we didn't see a bunch of numbers jammed into Monday/Tuesday this week, today is the day you expect to see 4 days worth of numbers jammed into this one. And if that's you, you're going to be disappointed. 8:30 is Weekly First Time Unemployment filings, which the Fed still watches but we are a month away from the next Fed meeting, so it likely won't do as much as it might if we were closer to January 29th. 9:45 a.m. is Final Manufacturing PMI (the lesser behind the ISM PMI number, so it won't do much either). 10:00 a.m. is Construction Spending (not exactly a Housing number but still not one that moves much around) and at 11:00 we get Crude Oil, held over one day thanks to the holiday. Not much going on today, number-wise, and likely volume is as down as Door Dash purchases of Pepto-Bismol and Alka Seltzer are up today, so don't feel bad if you sleep in and miss the entire morning.
FRIDAY: So by now you've probably counted like I did and realized for the entire week we've only had 8 numbers drop over the last 4 days. That should mean today will be a barn burner. Right? Right? Bueller? Bueller? Nope. 10:00 a.m. is the aforementioned ISM Manufacturing PMI and Prices numbers, which might be the first, last, and only hope you have to trade with some kind of fundamental working on your behalf this week, but this again is Friday after a mid-week holiday, so once again expect volume to be down noticeably compared to non-holiday influenced number. 10:30 a.m. is NatGas, the Wards Total Vehicle Sales number is a floater so we can't do much with it, and finally we close out this first week in 2025 with Barkin from the Fed speaking at 11:00 a.m. at some economic outlook forum in Maryland. Pass.
Enjoy your weekend and see you back here next week.
Jeff
