Other than this current year, UPS has historically been quite decent at predicting seasonal shipping volume. But is seasonal shipping volume good at predicting other things? Let’s find out.

Here we have UPS’s average US daily volume by quarter and the year-over-year change. Every year, during Q4, delivery numbers jump due to holiday shipping.

The last data point for 2013 Q4 is made up by me — In a late-October press release, UPS predicted that daily volume would increase by 8% this year. The fact that package volume exceeded their shipping capacity over the holidays implies that the daily volume in fact increased by more than 8%. Let’s guess, I don’t know, 8.5%.

And now we have the UPS year-over-year percentage change overlaid with the S&P500 year-over-year percentage change. UPS quarterly data points are shown as x’s because the data are less frequent.

The S&P500 is quite a broad index, however. Here we look at just the consumer discretionary sector, as indexed by SPDR in their ETF (XLY).

Does one track the other? I don’t know, but I need to get back to work before I get fired.

UPS will release 4th Quarter results on January 30, 2014.

Source: UPS Quarterly Results