NORTHBROOK, Ill.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Consumer confidence is one of the most widely publicized, least understood and underperforming indicators in today’s digital information economy.

TrendPointers is releasing “Who Broke Consumer Confidence?”, a review of how the 24/7 digital information flow has revolutionized confidence/sentiment measurement. This comprehensive whitepaper compares traditional forecasting methods to a new methodology which is more closely correlated to the Big Data analytics of economic activity, and that matches the speed, diversity and volume of news that continually influences economically sensitive expectations and behavior of consumer and business markets.

An independent statistical test of nearly seven years of data was conducted to determine the relationships between a leading consumer confidence index, TrendPointers’ MacroSentiment Index, and Total Retail Sales, and results demonstrate the power of the new methodology:

• Correlation analysis: a change in TrendPointers’ MacroSentiment leads changes in Consumer Confidence and Total Retail Sales by one month.
• No statistically significant correlations were found between traditional consumer confidence and total Retail Sales, leading or lagging.

Four keys to reinventing measures of economic sentiment:

1. The new context of confidence. The objectives for measuring confidence and sentiment have not changed over the decades, but the context in which confidence exists has changed dramatically.
2. The sources and sampling of relevant content have changed. Surveys use robust sampling of people, but we have little knowledge or control over the quality of the knowledge the respondents possess or the contemporaneous nature of their opinions.
3. The “new normal” for early detection of change.We are now able to reach further back in the sentiment formation process, capture and track its trajectory, and establish a new Interval Of Opportunity, the time between when a “trend” is emerging and when it eventually impacts economic behavior.
4. Descriptive vs. Predictive:It’s easy to collect data that’s descriptive, but our goal is to measure information that’s also more predictive of the near-term behavior it’s measuring.

The Elusive Edge

The new MacroSentiment Analytics advance the art and science of planning with highly sensitive and flexible indicators of the immediacy of sentiment influences on near-term consumer, business and market economic activity.

Download a copy at: http://info.trendpointers.com/who-broke-consumer-confidence

To contact TrendPointers: info@trendpointers.com Call us at (877) 550-1907

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