Intelligence
Cycle Positioning
A 10-dimension fingerprint of Alberta's economy compared against five historical periods. See which era today most resembles — and what happened next.
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Where Are We?
Fingerprint Overlay
Today's Readings
Historical Outcome
20-Year Timeline
Methodology
How This Works
The cycle engine computes a 10-dimension fingerprint of Alberta's economy using live data from the Bank of Canada and Statistics Canada:
- Fetch 20 years of monthly data for each indicator (BoC Valet + StatsCan WDS)
- Compute the historical mean and standard deviation for each indicator
- Convert the current 3-month average to z-scores (standard deviations from the mean)
- Compute the average z-score vector for each of the five historical periods
- Measure cosine similarity between today's vector and each historical vector
- For the best match, look up what happened to each indicator 6/12/18 months after that period ended
The 10 indicators:
- BoC Policy Rate (Bank of Canada)
- AB Unemployment (Statistics Canada)
- Energy Commodity Index (Bank of Canada)
- CAD/USD Exchange (Bank of Canada)
- Edmonton Housing Starts (Statistics Canada)
- Alberta CPI (Statistics Canada)
- AB Retail Sales (Statistics Canada)
- AB Employment (total) (Statistics Canada)
- 5-Year Mortgage Rate (Bank of Canada)
- AB Avg Weekly Earnings (Statistics Canada)
Important caveats:
- Historical patterns are informative, not predictive. Alberta's economy has structural differences today (TMX operational, immigration at record levels, diversification progress).
- Cosine similarity measures directional resemblance — which indicators are high/low relative to their history — not exact magnitude.
- GDP data is quarterly and interpolated. All other indicators are monthly.
Data refreshes hourly. All sources are public and free.