One Index, Three Signs. Michigan's Final Beat by 1.7, Fell 0.1 and Missed by 1.3.
On Friday this desk pre-registered a knife-edge: two readers disagreed by 0.1 on the American flash manufacturing consensus, 55.6 against 55.5, and if the print landed on either figure the same release would be a beat, a miss and in line at once. Manufacturing printed 56.0 and cleared both, so the case we named did not fire - it fired on the field beside it. Services printed 57.9, exactly one reader's consensus and 0.1 below another's, so it is in line and a miss simultaneously. Against its own September prior it fell 0.9, the only reading with no vendor dependency in it. The larger version is Michigan's October final at 48.0: a beat of 1.7 against the stored forecast of 46.3, a decline of 0.1 against September's 48.1, and the preliminary that printed 46.3 was itself a 1.3 miss against a 47.6 expectation. One index, one month, three signs, 1.8 points between the best and worst reading. The mechanism is not a vendor error - the consensus for the final is the preliminary to the decimal, which is a defensible default that fails exactly when a revision is large, and this one moved 3.67 per cent. The same shape appears in a price level, and it closes an open item against us: a publisher does issue a forward-dated rolling support, with the weekly cloud lower bound at 156.07 Monday rising 56.0 pips to 156.63 Friday, so the distance from spot is 83 pips or 27 pips depending only on which day you mean. We said nobody publishes a dated series. Somebody does.