Economic Dashboard

I was pretty tired this weekend, and away the weekend before that, but now I'm back with a post that I hope was worth the wait.

The Alberta provincial government has a very useful online portal called the Alberta Economic Dashboard. (It's been around for at least a couple of years). It provides a bunch of economic indicators for the province in one convenient place, including motor vehicle sales, housing starts, business incorporations, and employment numbers. Even better, it shows year-over-year changes to put the data in context. Every province would benefit from a similar "dashboard" in my opinion.

To round this post out, here are some other economic indicators that are handy to check from time to time. My recommendation is to expand any graphs to show at least a month or a year to get a sense of meaningful trends. To understand commodity prices, note that they use a defined basis (e.g. a specified quantity available at a certain place) to facilitate comparisons. So there is not one single price of oil, but there is a price for West Texas Intermediate.

Disclaimer: I've never studied this formally, and this is not investment advice.

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