Bad Economic News of the Day (BEND) Index 3
So I am on Day 3 of measuring the bad news, and it just seems to be getting worse. There was a blip of good news yesterday, but more bad news today. I am also trying to improve the method of measuring. My friend Ravi, suggested that I should straightaway measure the newspaper column inches of any particular newspaper. Then divide them into bad and good economic news. Then take either of these ratios: Bad News/Good News OR Bad News/Total News.
But there are two problems with this. It will fluctuate wildly everyday, since any particular day there might be much more bad news in total news or compared to good news. This wild variation will not do any good to the measure. We can also calculate the ratio over a week or a month to protect from the variations. But this in turn would involve continuos tracking, which is not possible for me now.
Meanwhile, I will continue with my current method of taking only factual articles, which fall under the categories of investment, consumption, production, income/jobs, profitability, savings and expectations (of managers/businessman like confidence surveys etc, but not opinion columns). For profitability, I will look only at profits from operational income.
The four news sources that I am using now are: Hindu Business Line, Business Standard, Economic Times and Financial Express
For today the bad news is
- Slumping Operating Income of BSE companies
- Down Job Markets
- Troubled Share Valuations
- Choppy Index Futures (Great risk of steep falls)
- Operational Loss
- Stalled/Dropped Infrastructure projects
- Negative Outlook for Core Industry
Good News:
So the final score: Bad:7 & Good: 2
Worse then yesterday.
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