On any given Thursday, there's a decent enough chance that the average mortgage rate headline will be unintentionally misleading. At issue is media reliance on the longstanding weekly mortgage rate surveys. If news stories are going to cite this data, that's fine, but it's critical to understand the methodology. Whether it's MBA (reported yesterday) or Freddie Mac (reported today), the weekly surveys have an inherent reporting lag--that is, they are published at least a day after data collection ends. In addition, they represent an average of 5 business days. This means that the weekly ...
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