Was #HOUSE depreciated & what is replacement?

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1

Hi,

#HOUSE returns no data for this year. Was this depreciated and if so what is the replacement?

Thank you

Scott

2

I have the same question for #UNEMP however this still returns data.

Thank you

Scott

3

I use #UNEMP (in my market timing) as well.

4

I think #HOUSE is still updated, but it is measured in thousands and rounded at the closest hundred of units, so it is 1.2 since April. Both #UNEMP and #HOUSE are updated with a delay of several days, so the number you are seeing today for #HOUSE is not updated yet.
I am also very interested in what happens and will happen to #UNEMP and #HOUSE. I am a bit bored of checking them manually from other sources because I don’t trust these dataseries here. Both are important indicators of recession risk. Could P123 get them directly from the UNRATE and HOUST dataseries of the St Louis FED?

5

Both unemployment rate and housing starts, along with a lot of other Fed series, are tracked by portfolio123 but are only available to the Macro tab/function currently. My understanding from posts is that the series which are only available to Macros are those whose historical data points have experienced adjustments at some time, so the history is not considered point in time and they await further work before being available to stock models. The best and most philosophically​ satisfying market timing model I’ve come up with makes use of several of these series. I eagerly await their usage!

6

See this viewthread on UNEMP.
https://www.portfolio123.com/mvnforum/viewthread_thread,10488#57772

Marco said 2 months ago:
"The economic indicator data that start with a single ‘#’ comes from Compustat. The data comes to us as a table with multiple columns (one for each indicator) and it’s monthly. I believe they update it once a month regardless of the frequency of each item. Furthermore it’s not point-in-time, so revisions of old data overwrite as-reported data. It’s something … should be ok for most. It was probably a side project to just throw something ‘macro’ in there.

We have our own project for proper point-in-time (where appropriate) economic indicators that we download from ALFRED (these indicators start with ‘##’). You can see them in DATA->CHARTS->MACRO. Only a subset of the Macro chart indicators are available at the moment for backtesting in portfolios and screens. It’s on the to-do list to expose all of them for backtesting."

When there is so much on the to-do list why is a new format being worked on (Beta version available now at https://www.portfolio123.com/mvnforum/viewthread_thread,10603) which appears to be only optical changes to something which already works well as it is?

7

Thanks for the link and reminder Georg. I agree with you on your last point. This topic and a few other recurring ones deserve a higher priority than cosmetics.

8

Thank you for the information. Any P123 feedback on what is the long term plan for these indicators?

Scott

9

P123, please reply to this question?

Thank you

Scott

10

The long-term plan is to deprecate the CompuStat economic indicators in favor of Alfred point-in-time data. That’s why they’re all in “To Be Deprecated” rather than “Deprecated”.

There are no plans to remove those macro data series, just replace them with something better.

11

Thank you for the clarification

Scott