Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke put it best at his Aug. 27 Jackson Hole speech: We are having a “crisis of confidence” in the U.S. and abroad.

Though the market is unpredictable at this point in time, there is no reason to throw in the towel and wait on the sidelines. There is money to be had; you just have to know how to approach the markets.

Here is a condensed list of overlooked economic and market indicators every person should know if they’re interested in making money.

By following these basic indicators, you will be able to formulate your own expectations of where the general market may be heading in the near future.

One indicator is unemployment claims that are released weekly by the Department of Labor. This statistic is important because of its timeliness to the markets as compared to the monthly released unemployment level statistic.

When you are comparing week-over-week statistics, look for trends not just reversals. A movement can be considered a trend after three to four weeks of the same direction move. I published an article regarding the unemployment claims number compared to the unemployment level in last week’s issue of the Future.

Reading that article would be worth the time to understand major discrepancies in unemployment statistics.

Going forward, the key is spotting a trend of more people landing jobs and fewer people applying for unemployment benefits. This will reinvigorate the housing markets.

Housing inventories give investors the number of existing unsold homes in the marketplace. These vacant homes need to be bought up before the market can recover. The U.S. is currently looking at the highest number of unsold homes it has ever seen, about 12.5 months’ worth of supply.

Once we see existing homes being bought up, then we can anticipate the addition of new homes to the market as the demand for homes will eventually exceed supply.

The VIX is the barometer of implied volatility of S&P 500 index options. The S&P 500 is used as the default market by professional investors because of the diversity that the S&P illustrates with its 500 companies compared to the DOW, which tracks only 30 companies. The meaning and mathematics behind the VIX are quite simple.

You must first understand that the VIX is an annualized number; so we can infer that by dividing the current VIX LEVEL of 23 (recalculated every second during a trading session) by the square root of 12 (months in a year) that the market expects the S&P 500 to move up or down 6.64 percent over the next 30-day period.

23/√12 months = 6.64 percent volatility over the next 30 day period.

Use the VIX as a measure of when to enter and exit the markets based upon your appetite for risk. The lower the VIX, the less risky the perception of the market is.

We may be in a period of extreme uncertainty, but the use of basic economic and stock market indicators are necessary when trying to navigate these rough seas.

There are many indicators to look to, but these three should give you a foundation as you enter the market.