The Monster Employment Index and NFP's

This may be one of those things that everyone already was following but me but one of the newsletters that I follow pointed out today how good the Monster Employment Index is becoming at indicating where jobs numbers will be.

The index which was was released yesterday and is a gauge of online job postings has been down three months in a row, the only time that has happened since it was created in 2003. Weakness in this indicator could be thought of as a good indicator of the monthly jobs number since it takes a few weeks to get people hired.

Anyhow for anyone who like me was not really following it up to this point you can subscribe free for email updates when it is published on monster's website here: http://www.monsterworldwide.com/Press_Room/MEI_US.asp

When is this Monster Employment Index released every month?

Right after NFP? If so, what predictive value would it have?

Thanks.

Hi Anyhowtrade,

You can find the publishing schedule for the index here:

http://www.monsterworldwide.com/Pres...S_Schedule.asp

Its put out the first Thursday of the month where NFP is put out the first Friday of the month. More importantly than this however is that this index is meant to give a gauge of whether the monthly job postings are rising or falling. This is where I think the predictive value comes from as it takes a few weeks to get people hired so if the monster number of online job postings rises or falls then we should see the effects of this in the jobs numbers several weeks after that. So in this sense its predictive value comes not from the fact that it is published the day before but from the fact that it is a leading indicator on jobs.

Hope that helps.

-FXTrader1979

Thanks for the info. I'll look out for the upcoming release and see how accurate they are in predicting the NFPs.

Hey thats really nice - thanks for that.

What are the other huge websites that has job listings in the US besides Monster?

Collating the data from various websites might provide an extremely accurate predictor of the NFPs.