Consumer Confidence

[HenryTo]

This is something I neglected to mention in our latest commentary this weekend:

http://www.conference-board.org/economics/consumerconfidence.cfm

For the month of March 2005, consumer confidence declined to 102.4 from a level of 104.4 in February.

The last time I discussed consumer confidence was in our October 31, 2004 commentary:

http://www.marketthoughts.com/z20041031.html

I will provide an update of this chart in our mid-week update. Like I said before, consumer confidence has acted as a pretty good contrarian indicator for the last 25 years. Witness the lowly 92.8 reading that we got in October of last year.

IMHO, the current reading of 102.4 is definitely not low enough for my liking. I would like to see a sub-90 reading here before I will advise my readers to significantly go on the long side. The downside to all this is that consumer confidence is only updated at the end of each month, and therefore we won't get the next (April) reading until at least three weeks from now.