The Juicy Little Secret “Sin Taxes” Tell You

As I’ve told you many times, the news is either misleading, or just irrelevant. What’s relevant is Rule Number One, “Don’t fight the Fed, and Rule Number 2, “The trend is your friend” aka “Don’t fight the tape.” So I concentrate my work in attempting to get a handle on the market strictly on liquidity analysis and technical analysis. (See my LAMPP update at the bottom of this article).

But it’s still really important to understand as much as possible, exactly what the US economy is doing. We need to know that because we need to be able to cut through all the Wall Street noise and sales hype to get to the truth about the direction of the economic data. That data does not directly drive the market trend, but it does correlate. It’s helpful to know when that correlation is based on a false narrative. That can help us with our timing on betting with the trend or seeing patterns of market behavior develop that indicate the trend change is underway.

The problem is that the economic data, and the reporting of it by outlets like the Wall Journal and CNBC, is often confusing. It is often based on the extrapolation of tiny survey samples. The data is heavily statistically massaged, particularly with the use of seasonal adjustment, which is an indefensible obfuscation of what actually transpired in a given month. Sometimes it approximates the real trend, and sometimes it doesn’t. Furthermore, the data is always reported with a lag, sometimes a few weeks and sometimes a couple of months. Things can change during those weeks and months.

The incomplete and misleading nature of the data and the way it’s reported often leads you and other investors, both individual and institutional, to bad investment decisions.

But amazingly, there’s a source of economic information that is accurate, complete, not statistically massaged, and real time. That is Federal tax data. It’s reported daily one day after the collections, and it covers a wide spectrum of data that accurately reflects the state of the most important sectors of the US economy.