Methodology

What the report shows

About 45 U.S. indicators in five sections: labor market, personal/household sector, industrial and manufacturing, housing, and inflation. Every indicator shows its two most recent releases. Each release has the period, the consensus forecast and the actual figure. Every row links to the agency or publisher that produced the number. Below the tables are GDP, published forecasts and targets, and market levels. A new edition is published every Monday. Each edition states the date its market data runs through.

Actuals are first prints

The Actual column is the value as first published on release day. It is not today's revised value. For series on FRED we take it from the ALFRED vintage archive, which stores what each series showed on each date. We then cross-check it against the agency's release. When a later release revises a figure, the first print stays in the table and the revision goes in Notes (for example, “Jul rev. to +21K”).

Year-over-year changes are computed by date

A year-over-year change compares a month with the same month a year earlier. It never compares with a fixed number of rows back. This matters because FRED has no October 2025 observation for several series, owing to the federal government shutdown. Counting back 12 rows would silently compare against the wrong month. If a computed figure ever differs from the percentage in the agency's release text, the release text wins.

Consensus

Consensus figures come from the first available source in this order:

1. Bloomberg survey median, as quoted in First Trust's Data Watch commentary.
2. Otherwise Dow Jones (via CNBC), Reuters/LSEG or FactSet. The Notes column names the source when one of these is used.
3. Otherwise, if a named source published a range of forecasts (for example, “economists' estimates ranged from 3.2% to 3.5%”), that range is shown, such as 3.2–3.5%, and Notes name the source.
4. Otherwise no consensus is shown, and the cell reads “—”. Any figure we can't source to a named publisher is left blank the same way. We never estimate or fill in a consensus figure or range ourselves.

Colors

Green means the actual came in better than consensus. Rust means worse. For inflation, jobless claims and unemployment, lower is better. Against a published range, an actual inside the range is not colored; only one outside it counts as better or worse. Rows with no consensus, or where neither direction is clearly better (such as mortgage rates), are not colored.

Markets, forecasts and targets

• Equity indexes (S&P 500, Dow Jones, NASDAQ Composite): FRED series SP500, DJIA, NASDAQCOM.
• International equities: iShares EFA and EEM ETF prices.
• Treasury yields: 10- and 30-year constant-maturity yields, FRED DGS10 and DGS30.
• Returns are price returns (excluding dividends), measured from the end-2025 close.
• IMF growth forecasts come from the latest World Economic Outlook or WEO Update.
• Morgan Stanley targets are taken from public press reporting of Morgan Stanley research only. Confirm them against internal research before client use.
• Existing home sales are NAR data, taken directly from NAR's releases.
• Market sentiment comes from the AAII Sentiment Survey, a weekly poll of individual investors released on Thursdays. It shows the bullish, neutral and bearish shares next to their long-term averages. The label (Bullish, Neutral or Bearish) is simply the largest of the three shares. The block also shows CNN's Fear & Greed Index, a 0–100 composite of seven market signals. Sentiment describes mood and is often read as a contrarian signal; it is not a forecast.

Sources

Primary sources used in the Monday, October 19, 2026 edition:

Disclaimer

This report is for information only. It is not investment advice and not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Figures come from public sources believed to be reliable, but errors are possible and data are subject to revision by the publishing agencies. Verify figures against the linked primary sources before relying on them.