Building Permits – Are they a leading indicator? A look back in history
9:50 America/Los_Angeles 19 May 2009 
1 Comment
All you ever hear about is how Building Permits are a leading indicator to the market. So I decided to check it out. I got the complete history of building permits from the US Census Bureau. The data goes back to 1960. I used this to see if there was truly any relation between the stock market performance and the building permits, by comparing the charts based on the same time periods.
What I found was pretty interesting in that there does seem to be a correlation, but it is a much better leading indicator of market tops than market bottoms.
This research will remain open ended and I would like to hear any suggestions or comments from you on other related research such as different time frame comparisons .. etc. Hope you find it interesting.. just click the image below for the full pdf.
Housing Permits Report
Thanks for the info! To me this just shows how Wall Street reaches pretty far in terms of indicators meaning something. The bottom line is that Wall Street will take any economic numbers and twist them whichever way that they want on that particular day or time frame.