I trade Nasdaq futures, and for a long time I worked from a feeling rather than a number. CPI was “big”. JOLTS was “probably nothing”. I sized positions off that feeling, and when a release did something I had not expected I told myself it was unusual, without ever checking whether it was.
Every economic calendar I could find tells you what a report printed and when the next one is due. None of them tell you what the market actually did afterwards. That is the only part I care about as a trader, so I built it.
The first thing it did was correct me. I had payrolls filed as the biggest mover on the calendar. On the median it moves 0.67% in the half hour against CPI’s 0.71%, and its worst days are smaller. I had retail sales filed as background noise, and its biggest reaction is more than four times its median, which makes it the kind of release that is nothing until suddenly it is not. Neither of those was a hunch I would have given up without seeing the count.
Release dates and times come from the publishing agencies themselves - the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Federal Reserve. Using their own schedules rather than a calendar rule matters: payroll reports have landed on dates no rule would predict, and a date that is wrong by a day measures the wrong minute of the wrong session.
Prices are one-minute bars on Nasdaq 100 and S&P 500 index CFDs. They trade around the clock, which is why they capture the 08:30 ET releases that land an hour before the equity market opens. They track the futures closely but are not the CME contracts, and every figure here is a percentage of the index level rather than a contract point.
The figures themselves are read from two independent sources, and where both have a number for the same release the two are compared at every rebuild. A disagreement is flagged and the agency's figure is the one shown. That check exists because I do not trust my own parser, and it has already earned its place. See below, and the methodology page for every definition in one place.
The headline figure on each page is the swing: the highest price minus the lowest price in the thirty minutes after a release. It is deliberately not the net change. A report can leave the index exactly where it started after moving half a percent in both directions, and the net number would call that a non-event while anyone holding a position would disagree.
Thirty minutes is a choice, not a law, and it is worth knowing what it hides. About half of a typical CPI half hour’s range is covered in the first sixty seconds after the print. FOMC is the opposite: the median distance from the release price at two hours is 2.65 times the distance at thirty minutes, so for that one release the half hour mark is closer to the middle of the story than the end of it.
I am listing these because a site full of numbers should tell you where its numbers have been wrong, and because both mistakes are the kind that stay invisible until something forces them out.
The word “unchanged”. The parser reading the BLS releases treated the phrase “changed little” as a reading of zero. At the BLS that phrase does not mean flat, it means the change was not statistically significant. Three payroll reports that actually printed +73,000, +22,000 and +64,000 were recorded here as zero before the cross-check against the second source caught the disagreement. Only a literal “unchanged” is a real zero, and that is now the only thing the parser accepts as one.
Releases that share a minute. Some reports print at exactly the same time as another. GDP shared its minute with Core PCE on 11 of its 35 releases, and retail sales sometimes lands with PPI. On those days the move belongs to both releases, and nothing here can split it between them. Counting it under each name flatters the quieter one: GDP looked about 1.49 times larger on its shared days than on the days it printed alone. The cross-release pages now leave shared-minute releases out. The release pages still count them and mark them in their tables, so the two can show slightly different figures for the same release.
No red and green for direction. A hot CPI and a hot payrolls print land on the same side of the arrow and mean opposite things to the market. Colouring one of them “good” would be editorialising, so direction is shown in plain ink with the word next to it.
No “beat” or “miss”. Those words carry a judgement about whether a number was welcome. The site shows the figure, the forecast where one exists, and the distance between them, and lets you decide what that means.
Counts, never forecasts. Nothing here predicts anything. I show how many releases a figure is built on wherever I can, so you can decide for yourself whether a pattern across 25 releases is worth anything. Some of them are not, and the pages say so.
The whole site is rebuilt every Saturday from the agencies’ published schedules and a fresh pull of price history, and again on the afternoon a measured release prints, usually two to four hours after it (an FOMC decision is usually measured the next weekday). Actual figures for 08:30 and 10:00 releases appear on the board within about ten minutes rather than waiting for a rebuild. The longer readings, the two-hour mark and the move to the close, fill in on a later rebuild. The statistics are recomputed from the whole record every time, and the figures quoted in these pages are filled in from the same run, which is why they move as the record grows.
These are records of what happened, not forecasts. Sample sizes run from 25 to 39 releases per release page, and fewer on the cross-release pages, which leave shared-minute releases out. That is enough to see a direction and not enough to settle an argument, and the release pages show their own count. Consensus forecasts are not published by the agencies and are read from a calendar, so they are the weakest input here. Prices are index CFDs rather than the CME contracts. Nothing on this site is investment advice, and I am not a licensed adviser.
Corrections are genuinely welcome, particularly if you have measured any of this yourself and got a different answer. The contact form comes straight to me.
Releases: Core Personal Consumption Expenditures (Core PCE) Consumer Price Index (CPI) Durable Goods Orders Fed Rate Decision (FOMC) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Housing Starts and Building Permits Import and Export Prices Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTS) New Home Sales Nonfarm Payrolls (NFP) Producer Price Index (PPI) Productivity and Unit Labor Costs Retail Sales Trade Balance (International Trade)