What is the major difference between the two products: Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) and Business Cycle Indicators (BCI)?
LEI, which stands for Leading Economic Indicators, includes the leading index and the two other composites– the coincident and lagging indexes. The LEI is released monthly, typically in the third week. This “economic news” release includes tables that list and document the underlying data, and index calculations for the latest six months. BCI refers to both the complete electronic dataset files and the monthly hardcopy report called Business Cycle Indicators. The report highlights the leading index and indicators in the LEI release, but has many additional data series and numerous graphs of their long history. The BCI database online has the same data that are in the report; these electronic datafiles are the only way to get the “full history” of data for further analysis. We recommend that users regularly pull data from the BCI files instead of trying to create their own record by splicing data from various hard-copy reports. Revisions to the historical data are common and they do no
