 We are going to deviate a little bit from our video series on ThinkScript, where I believe we are up to the part where we're going to look at the S&P 500 sectors and grid scripts as well as the last dividend script, and in the next video we're actually going to look at the breakout script, which is actually not in here. But I wanted to deviate a little bit because we are in the middle of, well, earning season and a lot of economic data at a very interesting junction. And I started thinking that maybe many of you see us chatting in the trade, in the channels on Discord, and we mention, we throw around terms that have to do with economic data and it actually affects your trading. It is something that, even though it is macro, it can affect you on the day-to-day or even swing trading, so it is very important to keep it in mind. So I put together this slide with three, six, nine of my, I'll actually throw in ten here just because earnings season. And actually, you know what, I'm going to throw this up here on, I'm going to go ahead and start out with that. So let's see if I can cover at least half of these in this video. So let's go ahead and actually we'll get started with earnings season. So I'm going to switch over here to Chrome and see if I can get a earnings calendar for this week. Right? So I'm just googling. There's a lot of places and you'll see them that they get thrown up on the Discord as well. Benzinga is one of them and earnings whisper is another one that you very surely have seen. I've never seen investing that, well that's a sponsored one, so it's an ad. MarketWatch has a calendar and of course you can get these on, there's some scripts that will do this on different platforms and they'll have their own lists and whatnot. But let me switch over to images and you'll see what I'm talking about. I'm sure you've seen this kind of a, this is 2019, this is August 14, I'm trying to find a recent one I guess. I'm not sure if I'm going to find one quickly enough. I don't want to overextend this video so let's just look at this one. This is the nearest one I saw or the earliest one I saw which was last week I believe, a couple of weeks ago. So four times a year companies report earnings and they're reported on a quarterly basis so four times a year. And it also, it makes sense because there's a lot of big macroeconomic data points which are also published four times a year on a quarterly basis such as GDP and stuff like that. So, well basically you know how this affects you if a company is doing well and they report good earnings theoretically it should be a positive tailwind for the company and inversely if it's not doing very well, if it reports bad earnings then it goes in the other direction. Now that doesn't always happen. There are other things, the two main numbers you will see for all of these quarterly reports as you would with earnings report is what the company reports its top line and bottom line were supposed to be or what analysts report the top and bottom line numbers are supposed to be. So the top line is the revenue, how much money they're making and the bottom line is, let me see if I can bring up, check out Yahoo Finance, see if we can see something for tomorrow. I usually check it on my mobile app and it will tell you which companies are coming up. Today is Wednesday, August 30th, so these are all the ones that reported today and then the ones that are reporting tomorrow, most of them will report either before the bell or after the bell. So, either after the market close or before the market close. Okay, let me see if I'll just move over, well this was for today, so I'm guessing I have to pick tomorrow. So tomorrow, Thursday, August 31st, you can see some of these report before the market open and some of them report after the market open, such as this one. So tomorrow we have, for example, Lululemon and there are two things you want to look at, as I mentioned, which is what this column is, the EPS, the earnings per share and that's the bottom line. The top line is usually reported as well, is always reported as well, but it is, like I said, it's revenue, it's how much money they actually made, well, how much they sold in products or services, whereas EPS is the profit, it's how much they made divided by the share, the number of shares outstanding. So we're talking about Lululemon, so they're expecting $2.54 cents per share and that will be tomorrow after the market close and after they report, there's another piece of information related to the earnings release, which is the earnings call, which is where the CFO or some other high executive will come on and say, well, this is how much money we made, this is why we made so little or why we made more, this is why we're expecting to make more and this is where they give their guidance, which is the next important piece of information, which even though you might have a met or even beat expectation for the EPS, stocks can sometimes dump after this and it's because they might guide load, which means, okay, this is what happened this quarter, you know, you expected or analysts expected $2.54 per share and we made it, you know, or we beat, you know, we made $2.56 per share, but you know what, next quarter looks really tough, you know, Q3, we're, you know, we're running into some stuff here, it's looking pretty bad and that is, is sometimes more than enough to make the stock tank, all right, and there's a lot of stuff that you can, you can research in here, you can go into the, the analysis and they'll usually have the analysts, which are covering them, how many of them are covering, which is obviously important, if it's a big enough company or a company with a lot of people, then they'll have a lot of analysts, as in this case, you know, 22 analysts covering it, and they will also have their targets, right, so they'll say, how many of them recommend buy or sell, as you can see here, a lot of them, you know, a lot of green here, so there's a lot of buy and a lot of hold as well, there's not that much sell, and they'll give you like, you know, the kind of the average rating, which in this case is a buy, and they'll give you targets, which is also important, and these are usually 12 months target, 12 months targets, right, so we're looking at within the next 12 months, the current price is 376, and the average analyst price target is for 20, and then you can calculate your, you know, you got basically 20 more bucks here, 20 more, that's 40 bucks, so that's about 12, 13%, something like that upside, and a lot of people will use that, okay, so that is what earnings will get you, basically, right, so you have to keep in mind, not just the revenue and the EPS, but also the guidance, that is important, and you will hear us talk a lot about, you know, and that's also as I covered in the investment strategy video, which I'm in the middle of doing a remake of it, by the way, what upgrades and downgrades have a lot to do with, right, if a company is having very good earnings, then they're going to be upgraded, if they, if a guidance call calls enough attention from the analysts, and then they go over and they work their numbers and they find out that that company indeed will have a very good quarter coming up, or a very bad quarter coming up, and those analysts will then, you know, basically go through the numbers and what they think the economy is going to do, and their market, their industry, and then basically say, okay, yeah, no, we're going to upgrade this because it looks good, or we're going to downgrade it, because we think it's not, you know, not going to do very well. So, when we talk about earnings season, we talk about revenue, revenue, yep, we talk about earnings or EPS, and we talk about guidance, right, because all of those can affect the market and not necessarily in the same way that, that you might, or not necessarily in the logical way that one might expect, okay, there's a lot of expectation built into what happened with EPS and the revenue, the reporting, and versus the one that's going to be guided towards in the next quarter, okay, so I'm just going to throw in upgrades and downgrades because that is indeed related, okay, so let's move on to the next one, CPI and PPI. So, CPI is basically, right, so inflation, so it's measuring the consumer price index is measuring what the price is paid by the consumer in, you know, a certain basket of goods and then they pick out the goods, it's not everything, it's the more important ones, the ones that represent the broadest part of the economy, and basically that tells you what inflation is, and that's what CPI refers to, refers to inflation, it's a measure of how much prices have inflated over the past quarter or year, depending on how you're measuring it. Now, this, you know, graph should make a lot of sense in 2020, prices, I guess, kind of dropped in the beginning and then they exploded, you know, because I don't know if you heard, but there was a lot of problems with supply chains because everything shut down, that included not just factories, but it also included transport companies, you know, ground transport as well as air and sea transport, and so prices basically, you know, started creeping up and climbing quite fast after the pandemic because, you know, it was hard to get goods from one place to the other, and then around 2021, they basically rocketed, as you can see, they doubled pretty much from previous levels and that had to do with the fact that now that a lot of companies had figured out how to ship goods and they had these, you know, COVID protocols in place, they were starting to do so, but then everybody had a lot of backlog and that, you know, created problems not to mention by 2022, there were still a lot of problems with shipping. Everything was still very expensive and then now, in 2023, after, you know, the pandemic reopening, you know, after everybody stopped being in lockdown, well now, prices have gone down and that is the uncertain territory that we are now basically navigating, but this is a very important measure of inflation and it's one of those economic data points that are reported and actually you'll see another one, which is also thrown around, which is the PCE and, you know, this is according to them, the Fed, the Federal Reserve, this is their preferred measure of inflation and this is just a graph denoting the difference of how the CPI, which is normally measured by the government, by the BEA, is composed by these percentages out of food, housing, transportation, medical care, recreation and other goods and services, which seems to be a lot more leaning a lot more towards housing, as you can clearly see, 42 percent and the PCE is a little bit more, you know, equal in distribution, as you can clearly see from that graph. So CPI obviously is important. There's also the other side, which is PPI, which is the prices paid by the producers and eventually if PPI, you know, jumps up, then some of those, you know, price increases or some of that inflation will creep up and eventually make it down towards the CPI because obviously if, you know, for example, a lot of transport went up, you know, it exploded, the CPI, the PPI for transport exploded during the 20s and 21s, right? Then obviously that's going to make it down to the consumer because if, you know, the producers are having to pay more to transport their goods, then they're going to at some point pass on that increase to the consumer. So, all right, that is basically CPI and PPI. So, and the thing here is, again, these are either monthly or yearly reports, right? And you will see things like month over month, or year over year, oops, year over year, okay? Oh, and of course, quarter over quarter. So, you have to keep an eye out for those. Sometimes you'll see, you know, things like if you see 0.2, 0.3 percent, that's more than likely the month over month. When you see something like 3 percent or 4 percent, that's probably the year over year. So, just keep that in mind. All right, so let's jump over to retail sales. You see here, get this out of the way. Retail sales, obviously, have to do with how much people are shopping. One of these things, one of the things that's very important to keep in mind is that the U.S. economy is consumer driven, okay? It is based very strongly on spending and however much the consumer spends has a lot of big effect over the U.S. economy. So, which is different, for example, from the Chinese economy, which is more manufacturer based. Okay, so again, this chart should make sense. You know, we had a huge retail sales explosion during the pandemic, you know, after 2020 and 2021, this had a lot to do with the fact that people were shopping online. You remember, everybody started buying like a, you know, office equipment for their houses and they started buying or stocking up on food and a lot of other home supplies and that had a lot to do with the explosion that you can clearly see here from the 20 to the 21. And then in 22, this unfortunately doesn't have 23, but in the 22, it dropped off because basically we had to come back to normal levels, right? So, 2021 was obviously a pandemic effect. Okay, you can see it's more than double. But then it came back down to more normal levels. And this is again something that is reported. And if you're trading stocks such as Target or Walmart, right, or Etsy or Wish, I don't know, all the other Costco, the dollar stores, all those, you know, companies, Kroger, well, sorry, was it not Kroger, Kohl's Home Depot, those are all retailers and they have, they have their ups and downs for different reasons, right? For example, to give you an example, I remember that a lot of people talk about Lowe's and Home Depot whenever hurricane season comes around, right? Because it has a big effect on sales, you know, houses getting destroyed and whatnot. And that has a lot to do with U.S. retail sales. So these are also reported quite often and they should also be monitored in case you are trading retail stocks, right? So we're going to just leave retail sales there and we're just going to drop some tickers, right? Which have to do with retail. Okay, consumer sentiment. Again, this is related to retail sales, consumer sentiment or consumer confidence is affected by different expectations of what the, you know, what the economy is like if you have an economy that's looking kind of sluggish, right? As you as happened in 2020, then consumer sentiment drops because consumers say, oh, no, we're not going to, you know, we're not going to be spending as much as we usually would as you could clearly see this was on an uptrend and then in 2020 with the pandemic it dropped because everybody got scared they didn't know what was going to happen. So of course you stop spending. You're is number one. So obviously retail sales are affected. But you also there are certain things that are affected by an event such as a pandemic or a lockdown because you won't stop buying food and medicines, which is probably more of what the kind of stuff that Walmart and Target sell. So you would expect retail sales to go up. But you definitely definitely don't feel good about the economy and your sentiment as a consumer, you know, drops a lot because you don't know what's happening in the economy. You don't know what's going to happen in the future. You're definitely not going to start making purchases like houses and cars and, you know, things like that because there are certain things that are considered discretionary goods, right? There's the luxury goods or discretionary goods and then there's the consumer staples that you always buy, right? So that is another indicator that gets thrown around and it's usually reported by Michigan, the Michigan consumer sentiment report. It's called I'll I have a list of all of these in a little bit. OK, and since we do have time for probably one more one, two, three, four, we've been through four. Let's do five GDP. And this is one of the heavy weight, one of the more important ones. This is a chart of GDP. This is GDP in actual dollar values, right? In trillions of dollars and you can clearly see how it drops off in 2020. And then it peaked back up and now it's just kind of settling back down after having recovered. You'll see it reported in dollar terms and you will also see it reported in. Let me see. This is an incomplete chart that again is in dollars, but sometimes you'll see it reported as percentages because they're actually talking about the percentage growth such as now this is income and spending. Here we go. Here's a chart. So sometimes you'll see it. OK, so, you know, in 2020 in the year 2020, GDP dropped, you know, there was actually a contraction. So it was negative three years, so percent. In 2021, it exploded back up, as we remember, and that it crept up to six percent. And this is year over year. So this is how much it grew from 20 to 2021. It grew six percent. And then from 2021 to 2022, it only grew two percent and so on. And this is the kind of data which is also reported on a quarterly basis. OK, and they review it. They also review it. Now, there's something that's really important about this, which I wanted to mention, which is there's GDP, right? And that's usually trillions of dollars, right? Or figures such as, you know, I don't know, a nominal GDP growth on year over year is probably like five percent, right? That's two year over year. Or you could do quarter to quarter. That's usually around, say, zero point eight percent. I could do like two percent, one point five percent. I believe that's what it is around right now. And but then there's also a GDP now, OK, which is a data point, which is not always reported. But if you do run into it, it's important to know. And GDP now is actually it's not called a forecast. It's called a now cast. And and what it is, it's basically a GDP value that they calculate, I believe, is on a daily basis. And and it is available, but it is not complete. It hasn't it doesn't factor in certain things such as, you know, big events, big macroeconomic events like geopolitical situations or pandemics or strikes or things like that. It's basically a up to date production data of a certain group of companies that are included in this in this calculation or model. It is a forecast model and we could Google it or find it on Wikipedia and see what it is. But it is sometimes used to forecast GDP ahead of time. OK, so those are all that's like the top five. Now, it's not the top five. It's five of the 10. OK, because we will definitely cover these other ones. I'll split it up into another video so it's not so long. But these are some of the more important economic indicators that you will find that are important to keep an eye on. And this is a trading economics dot com calendar, which is we used it to actually come in here. There's a lot of things that you can find in here that are reported. And as you can see, you can pick your dates, right? And you can filter by countries as well. If we just do U.S., for example, that's too many. You know, I'm just because I do keep an eye on a lot of these other ones. But if you're only, you know, trading in the U.S. although, you know, with the global economy, the way it is, the global economy is so interconnected that you can't just really keep track of one. At least the most important partners. So U.S., Mexico, Canada, but, well, China. But for example, this is telling us that for Wednesday, August 30th, and you can see the little U.S. flag here starting at 5 a.m., you get the mortgage rate and mortgage applications, which are very important. OK. And then you get, later on at 6.30 a.m., you get GDP growth rate. So this is quarter on quarter for the second, this is the second estimate, which I believe is for the previous quarter, which was Q2. So they revise it. They put out the GDP, obviously, after the quarter closes, and then they make a revision. And I believe they even make up to a third revision if I'm not mistaken. So this is going to be the second revision for Q2. As you can see here again, you know, this actual was 2.1 and the previous, that was a previous, but the consensus was 2.4 and it came in at 2.1, right? I do believe this has been revised down. So this was, oh yeah, this was revised down. This was actually today. This was actually today. OK. You get retail inventories without autos. You get, you know, a lot of stuff here. The, I believe the PCE is here as well. PCE prices, that's going to be, that was reported. Let me see here. Let me make sure this is Wednesday. Yep, Wednesday. OK. The core PCE, the real consumer spending, GDP sales. You get oil stocks, inventories as well. And then you can just go through the list and go through the day. So here's Thursday. Here's tomorrow. So tomorrow we get, let's see here, tomorrow we get personal income and spending. You get the core PCE. You get jobless claims, which is one of the ones that we'll look at in the next video. And then you keep going down the list, right? And then Friday. So I'm not going to go through all of these, but basically if you are trading a stock during a particular week and you see one of these, you know, economic data points being, oh, it's calendarized and it's set to be reported during this week, then you better be careful what it is you're trading because, you know, you could run into a nasty unexpected surprise. And that's something that you want to stay clear depending on what you are trading because, you know, basically, or because face it, nobody knows what's really going to happen. So if you're trading with these kinds of events, which have a lot to do with volatility, by the way, especially if you're trading options, then you want to be careful because the increase in volatility, you know, if you didn't plan for it, then it's definitely going to go against you and the drop in volatility after the report as well. So I just wanted to cover some of those basic terms and I will continue with these in the next video. We'll look at jobless claims or basically the labor market. We'll look at the dollar and the yields and oil as well as mortgage apps. So I hope you found this interesting and if you have anything that you would want me to cover specifically, you know, how different economic data points affect the markets, then go ahead and drop comments in the comment section and remember to subscribe to our channel and click on the bell to stay notified of new videos that are posted on a weekly basis. And don't forget to use my invite link to sign up for an Xtrades membership plan, you know, and I'll see you guys in the next video. Have a great one.