Word of the Day:
bellwether
What It Means
The leading sheep of a flock, having a bell hung round its neck.
Anything that indicates future trends.
A stock whose price performance is treated as an indicator of the likely direction of a broader market, sector, or industry.
Mortgage delinquencies often act as a bellwether for a forthcoming recession.
Bellwether in Context
“One of my favorite sentiment indicators is bellwether stocks — key stocks that are leaders in their fields. When investors buy or sell these shares, it's usually a good sign of confidence or the lack of it in that sector of the market and sometimes even the economy.”
Did You Know?
From Middle English belwether, belleweder, equivalent to bell + wether (“castrated ram”).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: bellwether (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “bellwether.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bellwether. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
