Glossary
How we use the words
Nicknames hide questionnaires. These definitions are the ones on this site, not a claim to own the English language.
- Consumer confidence
- A survey composite of how households rate current conditions and near-term expectations. It is not observed spending.
- Consumer sentiment
- Often used interchangeably with confidence, but tied to specific questionnaires such as the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers.
- Current conditions
- The leg of a confidence index that asks how finances and business conditions feel now, not next year.
- Expectations
- Forward-looking survey items. They move with news, politics, asset prices, and imagined policy — not only with paystubs.
- Nowcast
- An estimate of a series for the current period before the official print arrives. It is a model, not a fact.
- Z-score
- How many standard deviations a print sits from its own recent history. Useful for comparing series on different native scales.
- Revision flag
- A marker that a stored value later changed — preliminary versus final, or a restated weight. Signals without this lie to backtests.
- Purchase intent
- Survey or search evidence that a household plans to buy a category (cars, durables, trips) in a stated window.
- Lock-in
- Owners staying put because their existing mortgage rate is far below current offers, shrinking listings.
- Sentiment-spending gap
- When surveys look weak while nominal sales look firm, often because of prices, mix, or income composition.
- Sector tape
- CrowdMood’s category indices (retail, housing, autos, travel, staples, tech, energy bills, labor) rather than one global mascot.
- Educational composite
- The public dashboard number. Documented, lagged, and not a replacement for a national statistical office.
- CrowdMood Trident
- The desk’s named long/short overlay on Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, WTI, gold, and euro FX futures. Public output is stance (long, short, stand), age since the last turn, a dated price chart, and a sample track versus buy-and-hold.