The Seasonal Adjustment Filter for January 2023

Three out of the last five winters we actually have distorted data with a lot of outliers due to lockdowns, re-openings and such economic events. And therefore the seasonal adjustment filter will simply just take away these observations. What does that mean when we look into January 2023 numbers? Well let me show a few cases. This is the running seasonal adjustment factor for the ISM service index. So this is the monthly gauge of the service sector sentiment in the US. We have the business activity index and the new orders index on the screen. If you look at the seasonal adjustment factors for January 2023 it is basically a record adjustment factor.