Real-World & Alternative DataExtended setlive in productionNew

Census Ft900 Import Nowcast

Updated monthlyData needs: mediumlong onlyshort onlylong short

2008

In plain terms

When U.S. monthly imports are surging year-over-year, import-reliant retailers tend to restock and may see firmer demand a quarter later, so the strategy leans long on the import surge and short on the pullback. This is an internal macro heuristic, not a published-paper result: the data only supports a single national-imports signal, not the per-category (apparel vs electronics vs toys) split the cohort labels suggest.

How it works

National U.S. goods-imports YoY (Census FT900 World total) as a real-time leading macro proxy for import-dependent retail consumption: rising in-warehouse import volume plausibly nowcasts quarter-ahead import-exposed retailer demand. Internally-motivated heuristic. HTS-chapter / per-sector decomposition is NOT available from the current country-rollup ingest (the Census timeseries API now requires a key we do not hold; the working PDF press-release fallback carries only World + per-country balances), so this is a single national-imports nowcast, NOT a per-sector signal.

Live results

0 times picked on its own · 1 times inside a blend (1 beat the stock) · updated 2026-06-06

This strategy is a frequent ingredient in blends that combine a few strategies on one stock. It has contributed to 1 such blended picks (1 of which beat simply holding the stock). Picking it on its own is only one of the ways it shows up.

How its picks scored vs. buy & hold

Each pick is graded on a recent year it was never tuned on, against simply owning the same stock

Where its edge concentrates

Share of picks in each company-size group that beat buy & hold

How often it trades

Active vs. patient. Bars on the left mean it waits for rare setups; bars on the right mean it trades often

Return vs. buy & hold

How much each pick beat or trailed simply owning the stock over the test year (extreme microcap moves trimmed)

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Data dependencies

Daily prices
Adjusted-close OHLCV for every US-listed ticker; primary price feed.
Census ft900
A data feed this strategy reads, refreshed on its normal schedule.

Expected edge

Tested over: T+0 to T+90d

5-7% ann. long/short (Froot et al RFS).

Example tickers where this is likely to fire

LULU GPS BBY AAPL WSM

Illustrative only, the signal fires based on the live data, not a fixed list.

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