Track US economic activity daily

Leverage real-time news sentiment and macroeconomic variables to track US economic activity daily.

The RavenPack US GDP Nowcasting model leverages proprietary machine learning models to deliver a prediction of US Economic Activity: The Nowcasting model predicts, on a daily basis, the US GDP growth rate for the previous quarter Q–1 (Backcast), the current quarter Q (Nowcast), and the next Q+1, Q+2, Q+3, and Q+4 quarters (Forecasts). Model predictions are presented similar to a PMI index to better capture any sudden changes in the data.

Leverage

A Unique Vantage Point on the US Economy

The factors track topics in the news relevant to balance of payments, consumption, employment, taxes, and economic activity, including:

  • economic growth
  • exports
  • industrial production
  • interest rate
  • jobless claims
  • unemployment

as well as over 30 distinct macroeconomic factors. The model provides information about which variables altered the final prediction, and the magnitude of its impact. Follow the forecast line to find out more:

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This indicator can help quantitative and discretionary investors:

Nowcast Performance

The performance of the RavenPack US GDP Nowcasting model can be measured against the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) in a run-up against the benchmark of an auto-regressive model. The model that produces the RavenPack nowcast improves on the benchmark by 70% on average, and produces substantially more accurate predictions in the weeks before official figures are released.

Prediction error of an auto-regressive model (AR1) Prediction error of the surveys of professional forecasters (SPF) 50% better than benchmark 75% better than benchmark 25% better than benchmark Benchmark Actual GDP Sentiment-enhanced Nowcasting model 1 week 4 weeks 8 weeks 12 weeks 16 weeks 20 weeks 24 weeks Time until the actual GDP is released FORECAST NOWCAST BACKCAST Improvement over SPF in forecasting and nowcasting Improvement over SPF in the weeks before the release
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UNDER THE HOOD

Computing US GDP predictions

Backcasts, nowcasts, and forecasts are the outcome of a multi-step process that includes:

Content Collection

RavenPack analyzes textual content from high-quality sources to identify events that are relevant to the US economy. Documents considered include articles and press releases in English pertaining to specific economic narratives.

Information Extraction

Additional filters ensure the data remains focused on contemporary observations, and relevant organizations. In addition, events that relate to the comparison between expectations and actual economic figures are excluded to reduce noise.

Analytics Enrichment

For each event identified, RavenPack uses sentiment analysis to compute multiple scores by matching stories usually categorized by financial experts as having a positive or negative financial or economic impact.

Signal Construction

Sentiment scores are averaged and smoothed over time then introduced into a dynamic factor model as stationary monthly input variables with daily updates. Several dozen additional macroeconomic factors are also included into the model.

Model Output

The model produces predictions over 6 quarters, from backcast to forecast, with daily updates.

Nowcast Facts
Purpose
  • Improve timeliness & accuracy of economic predictions
  • Enhance asset and sector rotation
FrequencyDaily
FormatCSV
HistorySince January 2008
UniverseUS Macro
Content
  • When the prediction was produced, and when it will be effective (quarter end).
  • Latest and previous forecast.
  • The macroeconomic variable(s) whose release or revision impacted the overnight prediction.
  • The previous and updated values of these variables, and the difference between predicted and actual value.
  • The contribution of the variable to the prediction, and the impact of the release.
  • The type of prediction: BACKCAST (previous quarter), NOWCAST (current quarter), FORECAST (next quarter), FORECAST2S (2 quarters ahead), FORECAST3S (3 quarters ahead) and FORECAST4S (4 quarters ahead).
Delivery RavenPack, Snowflake

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