Excess Micro (Short-Term) Sentiment and News Narrative
Each calendar week ending Friday, we document the dominant economic, policy, and broad market narratives appearing across major financial news outlets. A topic qualifies if it appears in at least three of the following sources during that week: Reuters Markets Wrap, Bloomberg Markets Recap, CNBC Market Close summaries, Yahoo Finance market recaps, Financial Times markets coverage, Wall Street Journal markets coverage, and Barron’s. Company-specific earnings stories are excluded unless they clearly reflect broader market themes. Weekend “Week in Review” style articles are assigned to the prior Friday’s week, while weekend reports introducing new developments are assigned to the following week. Topics are standardized into neutral labels and tracked independently each week.
For the current week’s narratives, a simple tone indicator is added in parentheses. “Positive,” “Negative,” or “Neutral/Unclear” reflects the prevailing economic framing across qualifying outlets that week. Positive indicates coverage emphasizing economic strength or resilience; Negative reflects reporting focused on slowing growth or rising stress; Neutral/Unclear reflects mixed data or themes without a clear near-term growth implication. This classification is applied systematically using the stated criteria, without discretionary judgment, and does not represent an independent economic forecast or imply that news events drive shifts in investor sentiment.
Financial journalism often emphasizes risk developments and downside uncertainty, as these tend to attract greater attention. The tone indicators therefore reflect prevailing media framing rather than a balanced economic scorecard, and may exhibit a structural bias toward caution or negativity over time.
The overall narrative tone is determined mechanically based on the distribution of weekly topic classifications and reflects reported coverage, not an independent assessment of economic conditions.
