Monday, April 02, 2007

Charting the Future!


Today, I updated the S&P/Case-Shiller (CSI) Index Tool to fix a bunch of bugs as well as adding some interesting new functionality.

First, I added a year-over-year comparison option that displays the percentage change on a year-over-year basis for each reported month.

This allows you to see all the really impressive appreciation that was racked up during the run-up years as well as the more recent and equally as impressive depreciation occurring in many markets.

Las Vegas and Phoenix, for example, are truly bizarre! … 50% rates of appreciation out of thin air.

But the coolest new feature is the “futures view”.

As you many already know, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) now hosts housing futures trading (for an excellent source of housing futures information read the HousingDerivatives blog who’s blogger kindly helped me conceive of and implement this new feature) based on the S&P/Case-Shiller index.

Every day the CME releases a settlement statement with the current values (ask, bid, settle, etc) for the futures contracts that trade for the Boston, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington DC as well as the Composite index series.

The tool now captures those daily values and incorporates them into the chart view as additional months of data “beyond” the last actual reported month (currently January 2007) of the CSI.

This way, you can see what traders are predicting will happen to home prices as far out as a year in the future.

Ideally, if the market is accurate, it should prove to be a good analogue of what will actually occur.

Remember, the futures data is updated daily so the accuracy will should become better as we get closer to the contract dates.

As always, let me know if you notice any bugs or if you have any additional questions.

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