Beating the Business Cycle How to Predict and Profit from Turning Points in the Economy Book

Forecasting is an art more than science. People have been interested in forecasting for ages (astrology etc). Businesscycle.com folks have based their predictions on economic data and they have been timely and pretty accurate. The book doesn't discuss in detail however lists ideas with some citations (which I have not read yet). I plan to do the analysis of investments if I were to follow their advice for big picture. Let's see when I get around to it... :) Their WLI and FIG indicators are free on their website with historic data to download...


Additionally: Taking from linkedin review of someone else as I found it to be an excellent one...

"Achutan and Banerji, the principals of ECRI ("Economic Cycle Research Institute"), a business forecasting shop, and disciples of Geoffrey Moore --the originator of what we now consider leading economic indicators-- have written a book that is suitable primarily for the layperson yet useful to the professional. There is no formula for the "secret sauce" in this easily readable work; this will annoy professional forecasters and/or econometricians looking for that professional edge, techniques and references -as will the numerous references to the admittedly impressive track record of ECRI. Lakshman Achutan, as the public face of ECRI, has put the company's reputation on the line time and again over the past decade and more by proclaiming (well in advance of the competition) the troughs and peaks of the American business cycle (on television no less). To be fair to the authors and their venture, ECRI does make two of their leading indicators freely available to the public (on their website) and investment professional (via systems such as Bloomberg) on a weekly basis so while the book may appear to be an advertisement for the company's services, it does do an effective job in making the reader consider the framework of the microeconomic foundations of market supply and demand that, in turn, result in the inflection points in the business cycle. This is clearly something that even the most complex econometric models fail to do. So, why should you bother giving this book a quick look? (And it will be quick as a voracious reader could finish it in a sitting or two.) Because business cycles count and no amount of manipulation of the money supply can do away with that over the long-run. History shall show this to be true: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's proclamation of 'the great moderation' belongs to the dustbin of dumb ideas; the great market dislocations of 2007 and 2008 have seen to that, as has the abject failure of monetary policy hitting a lower bound. "