Each release's record split down the middle by date: the median half-hour swing across the earlier half, and across the later half. A ratio above one means the market has been reacting harder lately.
| release | releases | earlier half | later half | ratio | growing or fading? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PPI | 31 | 0.42% | 0.48% | 1.15x | Steady |
| CPI | 37 | 0.77% | 0.64% | 0.83x | Fading |
| Retail sales | 29 | 0.30% | 0.24% | 0.78x | Fading |
| JOLTS | 39 | 0.52% | 0.40% | 0.77x | Fading |
| Payrolls | 35 | 0.78% | 0.58% | 0.75x | Fading |
| Core PCE | 26 | 0.40% | 0.27% | 0.68x | Fading |
| GDP | 24 | 0.43% | 0.27% | 0.62x | Fading |
| FOMC | 25 | 0.65% | 0.38% | 0.58x | Fading sharply |
Two halves of a few dozen observations is a coarse instrument, and a single violent print near one end moves it. It is shown because the direction is worth knowing and the alternative is saying nothing, not because a ratio here settles anything.
The smaller reports, measured the same way and ranked among themselves: durable goods, housing starts, new home sales, the trade balance, import prices and productivity. Releases that printed in the same minute as another report here are left out of these figures too.
| release | releases | earlier half | later half | ratio | growing or fading? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New home sales | 35 | 0.40% | 0.52% | 1.29x | Growing |
| Trade balance | 26 | 0.20% | 0.20% | 1.00x | Steady |
| Durable goods | 22 | 0.25% | 0.21% | 0.84x | Fading |
| Housing starts | 25 | 0.24% | 0.18% | 0.77x | Fading |
Each release's record is sorted by date and cut in half. The earlier half gets one median swing, the later half gets another, and the ratio is later divided by earlier. Above one, the market has been reacting harder to that release recently than it did at the start of the record; below one, softer. It is the crudest possible trend measure, and it is crude on purpose, because with twelve to nineteen observations a side anything finer would be reading tea leaves with more decimal places.
Most rows are below one. The jobs report has faded to 0.75 of its earlier median, 0.58% against 0.78%, and GDP to 0.62. CPI is at 0.83. On the current record PPI is the exception at 1.15, the only release the market has been reacting to harder lately than it did at the start.
One reading of the fade is that the earlier half of the record, 2023 into early 2025, was a stretch when every inflation and jobs number was read as a direct input to the next rate decision, and the later half has been a stretch in which the rate path was less in play. That is a story, not a measurement, and I am offering it as the former. What the table measures is only that the medians have shrunk, and by how much.
Because the alternative is to say nothing, and the direction matters more than the precision. If a release's reaction has halved over the record, then the whole-record median on its release page overstates what the release does now, and a stop sized to the whole-record median is wider than it needs to be. I weight the later half more when I size, not by a formula, just by knowing which rows have faded. And I watch PPI more closely than its rank on the biggest-movers page would justify, because its rank is a whole-record number and the trend says the whole record is behind it.
That the fade will continue, or that PPI's rise will. Two halves of a few dozen observations is an instrument that a single violent print near either end can move on its own; the 10 April 2024 CPI sits in the earlier half and is a meaningful part of why that row reads the way it does. There is no test of significance here because none would pass, and the page would be dishonest to imply one. It is a direction, shown because it is worth knowing, not a ratio that settles anything.
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)