About TrendPointers®

                              Sentiment Driven Economic Planning

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In the investment world there are few surprises. There is only information that you get too late. What’s the mood of the market yesterday, today, and which way is it going? The clues are in the news.

Only one indicator can tell the whole story.
TrendPointers has created the most revealing of all indicators: Sentiment Signals©. There are hundreds of current market indicators, but Trendpointers Sentiment Signals is the one indicator that can sum up all the market influences to tell the mood of the market today and what it may be tomorrow or next month. TrendPointers provides you with the earliest indicators of sentiment shifts before the sentiment becomes the daily news.

The impact of the continuous flow of information is inevitable. We all know that days and weeks of bad news will drive down market prices and worry the consumers and business planners. So why do most people wait until it is too late to take full advantage of the information?

Sentiment is the result of news and market perceptions. Good news has one predictable effect, bad news another. Markets and businesses react based on what people “believe” may occur in the future.

We live in a self-fulfilling information environment. The media reports on moods, the investors and business planners read the reports and form opinions, and then the media report the changes in the “psychology of the market”. We are all influenced by the uncertainties we read and hear every day.

TrendPointers Sentiment Signals cuts through noise to the fundamental mood and sentiment of the market to identify the shifts in direction and intensity of sentiment before the trend becomes the headline.

               The Evolution From “After The Fact” To “Before The Headlines” Indicators.

Contemporary economic and business planners utilize hundreds of indicators of business, customer and consumer attitudes and behavior. Individually, each indicator provides a valuable insight, but it is the continuous and cumulative impact that creates attitudes affecting current decisions and influencing future behavior.

The very short definition of sentiment.
The premise is simple: information creates attitudes that influence behavior. Over time people go through a process to accumulate information until they feel they have enough information to make a decision. Due to this wait traditional sentiment and confidence measures are lagging and after-the-fact indicators. TrendPointers eliminates the wait. TrendPointers captures, measures and tracks the very same information as it comes out every day of every week of every month and reports it before it becomes the sentiment and confidence headlines.

TrendPointers has advanced the art of sentiment measurement by creating a highly sensitive and timely indicator. There have there have been two basic types of sentiment and confidence measures in widespread use:

Technical based sentiment:

There are hundreds of technical market measures from which observers impute the mood of the market. There are measures of volatility, short selling, housing starts, price indices, factory orders, and more, all rightfully used to identify the likely mood of the market and extrapolations of their likely influence on at least near term behavior. It's clear that if unemployment keeps rising or housing starts continue to fall then confidence and sentiment will not be not good.

Recall based Confidence.

Other traditional confidence measures are often based on surveys of consumers or business people, and rely on their recall of information over a preceding period in order to formulate their views about current and future conditions. Thus, survey based recall is also an after-the-fact expression of sentiment as it has the built-in time lag of respondents’ accumulated exposure to information.

These measures are certainly useful, but how timely are they? Surveys are a lagging measure; surveys ask people what they think today, about tomorrow, based on the information accumulated over the prior weeks or months.

                                       TrendPointers-Present At the Origins

              Trendpointers Captures The Raw Materials Of Sentiment And Confidence.

Sentiment is the highest order term to describe the cumulative body of knowledge, opinions and expectations as a result of acquiring and interpreting a body of information.

Information and experience creates sentiment. TrendPointers captures this information in near real-time, and in the original context, as it's being discussed and distributed in the public domain and before it is fully captured by other after-the-fact sentiment and confidence techniques.

TrendPointers does not take a survey of individuals and ask what they recall over a period of weeks or months. TrendPointers actually reads the news itself as it emerges in the public media, evaluates its content, tone and mood to measure the sentiment as it's being created every day of every week of every month.

          The Trendpointers Difference: Sensitivity -- Intensity -- Timeliness.

Sentiment is not a single number.

Sentiment is a range of moods that fluctuate and shift.

TrendPointers is a major evolution in measuring the mood and psychology of sentiment. TrendPointers measures sentiment on a highly sensitive and graduated scale, assessing the very language and contexts from which acquirers of the information form their attitudes. TrendPointers uses a well-established qualitative research coding process that is able to highlight even the slightest shifts from one mood to another that other measures may not yet be revealing.

Confidence/sentiment is also not localized in any one place. Different sources of information serve different markets, may have different points of view, use different types of information and may even use a different vocabulary to communicate.

 It is therefore critical to measure the major sources of sentiment independently to corroborate the mood and direction, as well as to get a sense of the momentum and speed of sentiment dissemination. Only TrendPointers measures confidence and sentiment in the three key sources of economic and business information: the mass media, the business media and what we call the guru media.

                           The Application of TrendPointers Sentiment Signals

Over the past few years, behavioral finance has been largely accepted as at least a co-partner with the efficient market theory. The latter states that most all information is readily available and factored into the proper valuations of economic decisions. The behavioral finance people say that this is just not true, that the psychology of the market often operates on unsubstantiated beliefs, fear, greed and optimism that influence short-term decisions.

                      Why Sentiment Signals Belong in Your Economic Models

Various measures of sentiment and confidence have been used in economic models and investing strategies. Some organizations have proprietary methods to incorporate the measures in their models, while others have not found confidence/sentiment measures useful because of their limited range of expression.

TrendPointers recognizes that confidence/sentiment measures have been and can be an even more useful tool in economic models. We have applied our 30+ years of behavioral and communications research expertise to creating a better tool for economic and investment planning.

TrendPointers specializes in only one service - market sentiment.

Our goal is to provide the most elegant and refined measures of the influences that drive economic and consumer mood. Whatever information you now use to evaluate the market, economy and assess business sentiment and consumer confidence, TrendPointers will give you an earlier and more sensitive measure before it becomes popular knowledge.