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Hey everyone and welcome back. This is Kirk here again from optionalpha.com. On today’s daily call, I want to talk about all the different economic data and indicators that are out there. In fact, not all of them, but I want to highlight some of them, maybe the top seven to eight or so that I think you should at least track or know about and be aware of during the month. Obviously, every single day, there's a lot of data that comes out about the economy, different sectors, different market reports come out and it can be overwhelming at some points, trying to understand exactly what’s going on, who's doing what, what sectors of the market are moving or not moving, contracting or expanding. And so, my goal in doing this podcast is just to maybe highlight some of the ones that you should be aware of. Now, I will be totally honest in saying that I don’t think you should necessarily track and chart and read every single report, but you should at least be aware of things when they come out. The way that I think about it is in the morning when I scan just headlines because my focus is purely on headlines for my trading purposes. When I see something come out, I want to know what it is. And so, if the producer price index comes out and there was expansion in prices, maybe that signals inflation at some point. Just having that understanding, that basic underlying understanding of where these reports are coming from, what they mean, what they could potentially mean in the future helps us just keep our head above water basically and make sure that we’re just looking out for the big things that are coming. If there’s a huge change in a jobs report or consumer prices or consumer confidence, that might be something that we want to be aware of. Again, it’s not to say that it’s going to always totally change our trading strategy for the week or the month, but we just need to be aware of it. We just need to have our head on a swivel. Again, my goal in doing this podcast today is just to let you guys know what I look at a little bit and at least the things that I just pay attention to more so than everything else. No particular order. I’m not going right on the top of the list obviously, but there’s a couple of things I think you should pay attention to. Number one is GDP. I think GDP is a big one. It’s basically this idea of everything that our market produces as far as goods and services on a national level and it measures just societal wealth. I think GDP that comes out from the Department of Commerce and Bureau and Economic Analysis or whatever it is, is a good representation of where the market’s going. It’s always a little bit lagged in some cases, so you might have GDP expand, but then they adjusted last month, so you want to pay attention to those adjustments as well. I think money supply is another big one although it’s not as important now because generally, money supply is growing exponentially with Fed continuing to print. Although now that we’re in potentially maybe an easing cycle and they may continue to ease or reduce the balance sheet, that may help reduce the impact of the money supply. Again, it's not something that I think that necessarily needs to be tracked every single day or week. You don’t need to change your schedule around to read the money supply report, but at least you should know what's going on and where the Fed policy is headed. Consumer price index and producer price index, so CPI and PPI I think are two really good ones. These are probably the first lines of inflation that we might see. If producer prices are starting to rise, so that’s all goods producing sectors like agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, manufacturing. If we’re starting to see those prices go up and these are basically the inputs for most products, then consumer prices might be the next logical step. Now, consumer prices don’t track everything. They may take a sample of a couple of hundred different goods and services and then track that and factor in taxes, etcetera. Both of those though, give us a pretty good measure of how people's lives are maybe changing, if things are getting generally more expensive or not. Again, this then relates back to money supply, how the Fed is going to start to react to changes in inflation or not going forward. Some of the other ones that I like to track… Consumer confidence I think is a cool one. We start to see people become either more confident or less confident over time. I think the survey size generally on consumer confidence is really small. I think the latest is that they ask about 5,000 individuals which is I think a smaller sample size and probably, I would like if I was doing this, if I was at that level. But I think the idea here is just to get a broad look at where people's minds are. Are they confident about the market? Are they willing to spend money? Are they making big purchases or are they holding back? That tells us a lot about their financial situation. Generally, in this day in age, although it’s pretty bad that this happens, but generally, in our economy here in the US, when people are really optimistic, they tend to spend pretty much all of their money and they don’t save. I think actually, probably a better representation of a healthy economy is when people actually save. But in this case with consumer confidence, it's looked at that when people are more inclined to spend money, they feel more confident about their employment, about their prospects for the future and so, we got to take it with a grain of salt. I think all employment stats that come out… I mean, look. Probably the big one is the jobs report every single month, so I’ll just say like the jobs report. There’s weekly readings that come out. I don’t really pay attention to those because those really change. I mean, there’s weather impacts and different holiday impact. The weekly things, you don’t really pay attention to, but the monthly numbers, I think you pay attention to. Just like GDP, the important part here for me is going back and looking at revisions. Oftentimes, the government may have a really good number. They’ll come out and say, “We added 230,000 jobs in December.” But then they revise the prior month down 200,000 jobs where maybe they thought the prior month was up 300,000, but it was actually only up 100,000. I think it’s always important to go in back and look at those indicators at least to glance through them, read the news articles on those ones for sure just to see where the jobs are being created. The employment stats though I think… I don’t know. I don’t want to use the word manipulated. But I think that in some cases, the way that they track employment is probably not the way I would track it. I know right now, they track part-time jobs as a full-time job count and I don't think that’s really representational of a full-time job. If somebody has two part-time jobs, that actually means that they’re fully employed, just one person is fully employed. But with two jobs, they count that right now I believe as two new jobs, so I don’t think it’s a good representation of where people are. But they do break it down into generally the different sectors. Is it healthcare? Is it manufacturing, construction? Are we adding retail jobs which just means that people are getting jobs at stores and helping out during the holidays? We usually see a pretty big spike around Black Friday and Christmas season in retail jobs. Is it leisure and hospitality which means that people are obviously travelling more and so, hotels need to hire more people, more leisure activities, people have more money to spend? Where are those jobs coming from, I guess? It’s really the real crux of it. I think the other major thing that we tracked… I say we tracked. I just monitor and look at it and keep my ears and eyes above water and listening too, is retail and where retail sales are. Again, just like maybe consumer prices or consumer confidence, having an idea of where retail sales are I think is a good measure, especially unfortunately in our economy which is so driven by spending. If we see a lot of people going out and spending money on cars or different retail stores, clothing, etcetera and not necessarily hoarding their money and saving it and spending it just on food and the necessities, then that’s generally a good indicator for our market. Again, I don’t necessarily agree with this on a fundamental level. I think people should save more money and should invest their savings, but it is what it is. The last one I think that I really pay attention to is housing starts. I think that housing starts is a really good leading indicator and always has been a pretty good leading indicator of where people generally think that they're going. If you think about it, housing starts are just representational of the number of housing units that maybe construction companies started or performed for. Another one is housing… I think what they call it is housing permits that they pull, so how many permits were pulled for new housing by construction companies. The reason that this is such a good leading indicator is because in most cases, it takes a couple of months, maybe even for some developers, a couple of years to pull all the permits that are required by the time that they actually cleared the land, put in the piping, the sewering, actually build the house and sell the house, turn to profit, etcetera. It takes time. And so, for the most part, they’re projecting out in the future a little while and if they don't have a lot of confidence to pull a lot of permits to start a lot of housing units, then they don’t really think that there’s going to be a good demand or demand is falling and they should probably wait or not build as many houses, etcetera. It’s not a perfect representation of obviously the economy. It’s just one small sector. But look. I mean, housing represents I think 4% or 5% of GDP, so it’s a decent chunk enough to pay attention to and again, it’s more of a leading indicator than maybe some of the other things that we might see out there in the news. Hopefully this helped out. I know it’s a little bit longer of a daily podcast than usual. But as we get started this year, again, heading into 2018 and hopefully you’re already starting out with your goals and habits that we talked about previously in other shows, I just want to let you guys know what I pay attention to. The key here is really not necessarily tracking all this stuff, but knowing when the numbers come across and you see headlines about it, knowing really what the fundamentals are behind it. There are some good resources on online on all of these. You can just search online. Most of the census bureaus and government agencies have very small briefings that you can get if you wanted to get them. I do not. I just really glance the headlines on Finbiz or Yahoo News or Google News, etcetera and just get an idea of where things are going. I want to know what it means when they say, “Housing starts were increased.” or “Retail sales trades were higher than expected.” I just want to know what that means and what it might mean for us in the future. I think that's really the idea that I’m trying to push here upon you guys today. As always, if you guys have any comments or questions, let me know. Until next time, happy trading!