Charts for Survey vs. Derivatives Based Forecast Comparisons

In the last few posts I showed the statistics that show that the economic derivatives forecast outperforms the consensus for the nonfarm payrolls announcement. Here are the charts that go with the stats. First, here is the chart of Actual (U.S. nonfarm payrolls or NFP) versus the economic derivatives or market-based forecast for the last 54 months (2002:01 - 2007:03). Here is the same chart for the Consensus or survey-based forecast: And side-by-side:And here are all three as a time series plot: Here are the forecast errors for the economic derivative or auction market forecasts compared with a fitted normal distribution (you'd hope that the errors were random and reasonably normal in their distribution): And here are the Consensus or survey-based forecast errors: Conclusion? You can't see much from the charts as the two forecast series both track the actual quite well and eye-balling the charts does not suggest one is better than another. However, the statistics of MAE, RMSE, correlation and especially the horse-race regression confirm that the economic derivative or auction market-based forecast outperforms the survey or Consensus forecast and that the latter adds nothing once you have the former.