Business Cycle Indicators - BCI

Composite of leading, lagging and coincident indexes created by the Conference Board and used to forecast changes in the direction of the overall economy of a country. They can be used to confirm or predict the peaks and troughs of the business cycle and are published for the U.S., Mexico, France, the U.K., South Korea, Japan, Germany, Australia and Spain.

Interpretation of BCI involves much more than simply reading graphs - an economy is too complex to be summarized with just a few statistics. Although past business cycles have shown patterns that are likely to be repeated to some degree, business cycles can start and end quite quickly for reasons that an indicator may not account for. Thus, investors, traders and corporations must realize that it is unreasonable to believe that any single indicator, or even set of indicators, always gives true signals and never fails to foresee a turning point in an economy.