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Topic
Business cycle
11 guides in Finabase Learn
- Cyclical Stock A stock whose earnings rise and fall strongly with the business cycle, such as automakers, airlines and industrial firms.
- Defensive Stock A stock whose demand and earnings hold up in recessions, such as utilities, consumer staples and healthcare.
- How sectors behave across the business cycle: cyclicals vs. defensives How cyclical and defensive sectors tend to behave through expansions and recessions, the textbook rotation model, and what 2021–2026 sector ETF data actually show.
- Industrial production and capacity utilization: the Fed’s G.17 What the Federal Reserve’s industrial production index and capacity utilization rate measure, how they are calculated, how to read them, and what 60 years of data show.
- Leading, lagging and coincident indicators: what turns first Which economic indicators turn before, with and after the business cycle, what the Conference Board indexes hold, and how claims and permits behaved in 2001 and 2008.
- Purchasing managers' index (PMI) A monthly survey-based gauge of business conditions in which a reading above 50 means activity is expanding and below 50 means it is contracting.
- Recession A significant, widespread decline in economic activity lasting more than a few months; in the US the dates are set by the NBER.
- Sector rotation Money shifting from one market sector to another as the economy or interest rates change, and strategies that try to follow those shifts.
- The business cycle: expansions, peaks, recessions and troughs What the business cycle is, its four phases, how long US expansions and recessions have lasted since 1945, what tends to end them, and how unemployment tracks the cycle.
- The Sahm rule: a recession signal from the unemployment rate How the Sahm rule works, a step-by-step calculation, its record since 1960, why it crossed 0.50 in 2024 with no recession following, and real-time versus revised data.
- What is a recession? How the NBER dates US recessions How the NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee decides when US recessions start and end, why “two negative quarters” is not the rule, and what 2001 and 2022 show.
Educational content, not investment advice. Finabase Learn explains how markets and tools work. It does not recommend any security or strategy, and examples are for illustration only. Investing involves risk, including the loss of principal. Rules and figures are for the United States unless stated and can change — check the cited source before you act.