2012.12.14 Monthly Amex Oil Index Cycle Chart

Here is the Amex Oil Index model. This model is the only one that remains unchanged from July, 2012.  It did not have any interest rate or unemployment data inputs and there may be a lesson in this. KISS.

2012.12.14 Monthly Gold Cycle Chart

Here is the new gold cycle model chart. As with the silver model, all cycles < 233 days were excluded from the analysis, as well as any cycle information obtained from outside the data series.

2012.12.14 Monthly Silver Cycle Chart

This is the new cycle model for silver. It has been pruned so that all data inputs are directly related to the time series and nothing else. All cycles with periods less than 233 days were also eliminated from the analysis because short-term fluctuations were much less helpful in decreasing error than has been the case in the past.  I'll see if I can update it at least monthly. 

2012.12.14 Monthly DJIA Cycle Charts

I have been slowly rebuilding the cycle models, which are now less complex as a result of the input data pruning. As promised, here is the new cycle model for the DJIA.  One of the cycle model inputs, a cyclical model of its own relating the yield curve spread and rate of change of US monetary aggregates is worse than useless and was contributing to the increasing error. I have also dropped all inputs regarding employment data from the US BLS. The increasing second-degree fluctuation of their short-term variance convinced me that the set of data I was using contained more noise than information. The academic question is now not whether  Fed interventions can change business cycle amplitude and phase, but by how much and over what time window. Right now, it looks like the long-term cycles with a period > 8 years are stable since 1896, and it is the noise in the shorter cycles that created the error in the previous model version beginning around early 2010.   So according to the model, we might have topped out on the DJIA.