AAR Reports Increased Rail Traffic

Steel Market Update (SMU) was reading the most recent Armada Corporate Intelligence report where they referred to the railroad carload statistics as the “secret weapon” known to the big names in the investing business. The Association of American Railroads (AAR) weekly reports are followed by Armada  because, “…it will give you weeks of warning about economic changes long before we see it in other economic figures. Some of the metrics in the report have more than an 80% correlation between it and GDP.” (Dr. Chris Kuehl of Armada was one of our keynote speakers at our 2014 Steel Summit)

Armada pointed out in an analysis in their Corporate Intelligence report (which SMU highly recommends to our readers) that the AAR data suggests strong economic growth will continue in the United States. However, the automotive data provided a bit of contrary reading, “Although it is up (YTD up by 4.3%), this is much slower growth rate than we have seen in the past (arguably against some strong growth metrics). Since automotive has been one of the stronger components of growth to help fuel the recovery, there is some concern that this weakness could be showing a slowing of the sector. We need to monitor it and see if it improves.”