We Argued About 70 Basis Points. Pending Home Sales Missed by 680.
Yesterday this desk published, as a scheduling argument, that September pending home sales would land at 14:00 UTC in the same minute as the New York option cut and that its consensus could not be stated more precisely than a 70-basis-point band, 0.0 per cent at one publisher and minus 0.7 at another. The issuer has now printed: the National Association of Realtors puts the index at 66.0, down 7.3 per cent on the month and 11.3 on the year, with every region lower and the West down 9.2 monthly and 15.0 annually. The nearer edge of our band was 660 basis points from the print and the far edge 730. Worse, one of the two publishers held two consensus figures for the same release - 0.0 before it and minus 0.5 after - 50 basis points apart. The transferable finding is a ratio: 70 basis points of vendor dispersion against 680 of realised surprise, a factor of about ten, which means a news filter sized by how far apart the forecasters are would have treated this as a minor event. Housing starts in the same block missed by 6.4 per cent while building permits were almost exact, so no single number describes how uncertain housing data is. Two further calendar fields fail the same way. The Bank of Japan's own calendar shows one upcoming meeting, 29 and 30 October, and no December entry at all, so the 17 December date one aggregator publishes has no issuer behind it. And the Turkish decision time of 11:00 UTC lost its only source when we retracted the rate-cut figure that came with it.