Recent economic data for the US suggests that the stock market’s hissy fit this year has been a false signal for anticipating a new recession. That’s not surprising—the short-term noise in equity prices is a constant challenge for business-cycle analysis and so it’s not uncommon that market volatility will lead us astray at times. That’s always been the case and nothing’s changed. Looking to markets in isolation of hard economic numbers is a dangerous game if real money is at stake. The challenge is finding a happy medium. The good news is that there are several choices for relatively reliable signals.

If you could only look at one measure of economic activity for monitoring recession risk the single-best indicator is the Chicago Fed’s National Index—the three-month moving average (CFNAI-MA3) in particular. In the grand scheme of macro benchmarks that are publicly available for free from institutional sources, CFNAI-MA3 is a tough act to beat.

Like all efforts at monitoring recession risk, CFNAI-MA3 is forced to make compromises. But in a world of generally poor choices, this index provides what is arguably the best mix for finding the sweet spot between reliability and timely signals. The reliability aspect is a direct function of its broad design that incorporates 85 indicators. The monthly frequency suffers from a bit of a lag, but this updating schedule is useful because it helps us look past the day-to-day numbers that can offer confusing messages.

It’s no trivial point that CFNAI-MA3’s track record is encouraging in terms of dispensing comparatively timely and accurate signals about recession risk. For example, a review of the index’s vintage data shows that CFNAI-MA3 issued a recession warning on Mar. 24, 2008. That was a timely call when you consider that the economy peaked only a few months earlier, in Dec. 2007, according to NBER’s data.

Keep in mind that that many analysts—including a number of high-profile economists—continued to argue into the spring and early summer of 2008 that the US would avoid a recession.