Reuters Poll Trend
The latest Reuters Poll Trend points to a slowing in the government’s recovery momentum since its March 2007 nadir. The Trend also suggests a landslide Labor win were an election held earlier this year.
The Reuters Poll Trend is not a poll; it is an analysis of the three main polls — Newspoll, published in The Australian newspaper, ACNielsen, published in the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers, and the Morgan Poll, published on line. The Trend aims to summarise the polls by compiling them and removing their volatility. It starts by rolling the published data from the major polls into a fortnightly three-poll average, weighting them equally and the smoothing volatility by using a five-term Henderson moving average. The Henderson process dampens short-term up-and-down movement but aims to leave untouched the underlying drift in the data.