Mitcham Industries Inc

As you know, the Fed dictates the direction of the markets… but there's actually a way to predict the Fed's actions ahead of time. And this indicator is available to us every day in real time.

There's an economic indicator (actually, indicators) that gives a much clearer picture of the U.S. economy than the official and unofficial economic statistics that are reported in the mainstream media. It's hard cold data of what actually is. It's not collected by survey, not constructed from tiny samples and then extrapolated a million-fold, and not manipulated by statisticians and economists. It isn't misreported by the media because they never report it.

The U.S. Treasury publishes this data every day, one day after those taxes are collected. When it comes to the U.S. economy, it doesn't get any more real time than that.

It is U.S. government tax collections, and right now it's telling an important story that we all need to pay attention to.

But economists and Wall Street talking heads and PR merchants seemingly ignore this data. If they do track it, they don't report it to us. I do. I have been tracking, accumulating, and reporting this data for many years.

Economic activity does not drive stock prices. Liquidity does. But if we know what the U.S. economy is actually doing, we can get an idea of how policymakers will respond to economic data. And since we're up-to-date on the tax data, we know in advance what the lagging official economic statistics should tell them.

Sometimes the massaged and manipulated official statistics don't match up with reality. Then we know that the narrative about the economy that is being fed to investors is false.

All of that helps us to understand whether the current market trend is sustainable or not. It tells us whether the dominant narrative about the economy is mostly true or not. Most importantly, it tells us how central bankers, particularly the Fed chair and the FOMC, will formulate policy.