About TrendPointers®

                              Early Detection of Market Sentiment

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

Only one indicator can tell the whole story. Sentiment is not a single number. Sentiment is a range of moods that fluctuate and shift.

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 become the daily news.

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? An army of analysts and observers are all looking at the same information, chasing after the next best idea, seeking that elusive edge. TrendPointers has taken one great leap forward in analyzing economic sentiment.

TrendPointers has adapted analytical techniques we have used in behavioral and communications research disciplines to create a simple, near real-time process to capture the subtleties of changing sentiment before the sentiment becomes common knowledge. Sentiment is not just a number; it is an indicator of the mood of the market that we can watch to identify shifts.

Economic and business planners utilize hundreds of indicators of business and consumer attitudes and behavior. Individually, each indicator provides a valuable insight, but it is the continuous and cumulative impact that creates attitudes, affects current decisions and influences future behavior.

The premise is simple: information creates the 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.

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

                               The 5 Dimensions of TrendPointers Sentiment

1. Sentiment Must Be Timely- TrendPointers Eliminates The Wait.

 In our information age, no idea is secret or unpublished. Economic issues that make the news do not just happen; they start long before anyone connects the dots to make the story a headline. Most sentiment related events become “trends” near or at their peak of visibility, often after the most profitable decision making stages have been reached or passed.

We live in a self-fulfilling information environment.

We are all influenced by the uncertainties we read and hear every day. TrendPointers Sentiment Signals© cut 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.

Traditional sentiment and confidence measures are lagging and after-the-fact indicators. TrendPointers eliminates the wait.

2. True sentiment detection is not just a science, it is an art.

The reality is that the messages, advice, warnings and opinions in our daily news are what create optimism or panic. To capture this mood ahead of the curve we need a true and sensitive indicator of sentiment.

TrendPointers uses a genuine positive-uncertain-negative sentiment index that shows both the direction and intensity of sentiment shifts, assessing the very language and contexts from which acquirers of the information form their attitudes.

At TrendPointers we are experts in attitudinal and behavioral research in the marketing environment. The methods used to gain value from marketing information have been applied to economic relevant information. Each month TrendPointers editorial analysts actually read thousands of reports from the media to assess the context, mood and language of the news to present the most refined measure of sentiment at its source.

 TrendPointers does not rely on survey-based recall of the news, nor infer the sentiment from numerical measures of market activity. The origin of most sentiment is the actual information people read and hear every day, and TrendPointers converts that flow into a simple and consistent measure of sentiment. Until TrendPointers, there have there have been two basic types of sentiment and confidence measures in widespread use:

Technical based sentiment:

The 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 extrapolate their likely influence on at least near term behavior.

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 an after-the-fact expression of sentiment as it has the built-in time lag of respondents’ accumulated exposure to information.

The traditional 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.

3.  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.

TrendPointers captures this information in near real-time, in the original context, as it's being discussed 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 from the past. TrendPointers actually reads the news itself as it emerges in the public media, evaluates its content and mood to measure the sentiment as it's being created every day of every week of every month.

We constantly monitor the economic issues that are highly visible, volatile, shape financial events, both positive and negative, and reveal opportunities or warnings for early decision making. Right now we monitor sentiment about the four core issues of our day.

• Overall Economic Environment: The overall sentiment about the US and global economies and investing climate.
• Housing: The most watched economic factor. Its performance has a dramatic ripple effect throughout the economy.
• China: The growing economic power that has extraordinary influence over US finances.
• Recession Watch: Add it all up and the daily discussion is about recession, depression and economic recovery.

Sentiment in Context: The Trend Impact Score. The influential economic factors that market watchers use to take the pulse of economic conditions.

We need the news and the numbers. TrendPointers has created the proprietary Trend Impact Score©, 25 influential economic factors that impact economic decisions. Every day, economic professionals weigh the potential impact of hundreds of mathematical and financial indicators. TrendPointers has developed a measure that distills leading economic indicators to a single tracking index to identify and track the technical clues that impact economic decision making.

4. Watchfulness and News migration: Since we don't know when or where the information we need may surface we watch a vast array of sources as it migrates up a news chain. Sentiment is tracked in three key sources: guru media, business media and mass media, the most popular sources of economic news.

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

 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.

5. Why Sentiment Signals Belong in Your Economic Models

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

 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 valuations of economic decisions. The behavioral finance people state  that the psychology of the market often operates on unsubstantiated beliefs, fear, greed and optimism that influence short-term decisions.

Various measures of sentiment and confidence have been used in economic models, but some analysts 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 headline.