Should macroeconomic forecasters use daily financial data and how?

We introduce easy to implement regression-based methods for predicting quarterly real economic activity that use daily financial data and rely on forecast combinations of Mixed Data Sampling (MIDAS) regressions. We also extract a novel small set of daily financial factors from a large panel of about one thousand daily financial assets. Our analysis is designed to elucidate the value of daily information and provide real-time forecast updates of the current (nowcasting) and future quarters of real GDP growth. Our findings show that while on average the predictive ability of all models worsens substantially following the financial crisis that started in 2007, the models we propose suffer relatively less losses than the traditional ones. Moreover, these predictive gains are primarily driven by the classes of government securities, equities, and especially corporate risk.