Bloomberg Surveillance · Friday, August 14, 2026
Aditya Bave of Bank of America credits his team's accurate retail sales forecast to their 'incredible data scientists' and a large dataset of aggregated credit and debit card spending. He explained that applying judgment and considering seasonal factors to this data allowed them to predict the significant July decline, which is largely viewed as a temporary 'blip'.
“We have incredible data scientists. That's the first thing I'll say. We get this very large data set that's aggregated credit and debit god spending from Bank of America. Our data scientist process it. They are really really top notch. And then they gave us kind of a variety of ways of thinking about the forecast. Then we apply some judgment, and we also think about how the seasonal factors are going to behave for the month. But that will mush that all together.”
“We are very low in July retail sales. We I believe have the lowest forecast on the street for the control group negative sixtents. However, negative negative sixtents however, is that what.”