Macroeconomics
Fed Rate Cut Odds: Prediction Markets vs CME FedWatch
Two respectable sources can quote different odds on the same Fed decision. Neither is broken — they are built from different instruments and carry different assumptions.
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Macroeconomics and Economic Data
Explore inflation, central banks, economic indicators and historical events, with guides to reading releases in their market context.
42 guides. Start with the introductory topics; follow related links inside each guide.
Macroeconomics
How FOMC Decisions Impact S&P 500 Volatility
Eight days a year, a scheduled announcement compresses weeks of uncertainty into ninety minutes. Volatility models that spread risk evenly across the calendar miss this entirely.
Economic Indicators
CPI Release Surprises and Probability Re-Pricing
The inflation number itself is almost irrelevant. What moves markets is the distance between the number and what was already priced in.
Macroeconomics
Inflation Explained
Inflation is the slow erosion of purchasing power — and CPI, Core CPI, PPI, and PCE are four different rulers economists use to measure it.
Macroeconomics
Why CPI Matters
A single monthly report can swing stocks, bonds, and currencies within seconds — here's why CPI carries so much weight with investors.
Macroeconomics
Federal Reserve Explained
The U.S. central bank shapes borrowing costs, market liquidity, and investor psychology — here's its mandate, its tools, and why every word it says gets parsed.
Macroeconomics
Interest Rates Explained
The price of money touches nearly everything in markets — from mortgage payments to how a stock gets valued.
Macroeconomics
Rate Cuts Explained
A Fed rate cut can send stocks rallying — or signal trouble ahead. The market's reaction depends entirely on why the cut is happening.
Macroeconomics
Quantitative Tightening (QT)
QT is the Fed quietly draining liquidity from the financial system by letting its bond holdings shrink — a slower-moving cousin of rate hikes.
Macroeconomics
Quantitative Easing (QE)
QE is how central banks flood the financial system with liquidity when interest rate cuts alone aren't enough.
Macroeconomics
Money Supply (M2)
M2 tracks the cash and near-cash sloshing through the economy — and its growth rate is one of the quieter signals investors watch for shifts in liquidity.
Macroeconomics
Recession Indicators
No single data point calls a recession — but a handful of indicators have a strong enough track record that markets watch them closely.
Macroeconomics
Soft Landing vs Hard Landing
Whether the economy cools gently or crashes hard shapes everything from earnings forecasts to how aggressively markets price in rate cuts.
Macroeconomics
Stagflation Explained
Stagflation pairs stagnant growth with stubborn inflation — a combination that leaves policymakers with no clean tool to fix both at once.
Macroeconomics
Deflation Explained
Falling prices sound like good news for shoppers, but sustained deflation can be more economically damaging than the inflation it replaces.
Market Calendar
Market Sessions Explained
Pre-market, regular hours, and after-hours — what changes, why moves happen overnight, and what “live” means.
Market Calendar
Economic Calendar
An economic calendar lists the scheduled releases — inflation reports, jobs data, central bank decisions — that markets know are coming, and yet still react to sharply the moment the numbers hit.
Market Calendar
Most Important Market Events
Not all scheduled events move markets equally. Some recurring releases reliably shake every asset class, while others barely register beyond their own sector.
Market Calendar
Earnings Calendar
Public companies report results four times a year, and those reports cluster into a handful of intense weeks each quarter when a huge share of the market's news flow — and volatility — gets compressed into a few days.
Market Calendar
Options Expiration: Dates, Gamma and Market Effects
Learn how weekly and monthly options expiration can affect hedging, gamma exposure, price pinning and volatility around expiry.
Market Calendar
Triple Witching
Four times a year, stock options, stock index options, and stock index futures all expire on the same day — a coincidence of calendars that historically comes with a noticeable jump in trading volume and volatility.
Economic Indicators
Nonfarm Payrolls Explained
The monthly jobs report moves stocks, bonds, and the dollar within seconds of release. Here's what's actually inside it.
Economic Indicators
ADP Employment Report Explained
Private payroll processor ADP publishes its own jobs count two days before the government's — traders use it as an early read, with mixed results.
Economic Indicators
Retail Sales Explained
Consumer spending drives most of the US economy, and the Retail Sales report is the fastest official read on whether shoppers are still spending.
Economic Indicators
Consumer Confidence Explained
How households feel about the economy often shapes how they spend — which is why sentiment surveys get read as a leading indicator, not just a mood check.
Economic Indicators
Initial Jobless Claims Explained
Filed every week and reported every Thursday, jobless claims are the closest thing to a real-time pulse check on the labor market.
Economic Indicators
GDP Explained
Gross Domestic Product is the broadest scorecard for the economy's size and growth rate — and it comes with more caveats than its headline number suggests.
Economic Indicators
Durable Goods Orders Explained
Orders for big-ticket items — planes, machinery, appliances — offer an early read on business investment, but the headline number is notoriously choppy.
Economic Indicators
Housing Starts Explained
New home construction is one of the earliest indicators to turn as the economic cycle shifts — and one of the most sensitive to mortgage rates.
Economic Indicators
Existing Home Sales Explained
Resales, not new construction, make up the vast majority of the US housing market — and this report is the clearest read on real-world buyer demand.
Economic Indicators
JOLTS Report Explained
Job openings, hires, and quits — the Fed's preferred window into labor-market slack, and the data series that gave the Great Resignation its name.
Economic Indicators
Beige Book Explained
No hard statistics, just on-the-ground anecdotes from businesses across the country — collected by the Fed's regional banks ahead of every policy meeting.
Historical Events
Dot-Com Bubble Explained
The late-1990s internet mania sent the Nasdaq to dizzying heights on little more than a story, then erased most of the gains in two brutal years.
Historical Events
2008 Financial Crisis Explained
Years of cheap credit and mortgage risk built up quietly before Lehman Brothers' collapse turned a housing slowdown into a global banking panic.
Historical Events
COVID-19 Market Crash Explained
In February 2020 stocks fell into the fastest bear market ever recorded, then staged one of the fastest recoveries in history on the back of unprecedented stimulus.
Historical Events
AI Boom Explained
Generative AI has triggered one of the largest corporate investment cycles in history and reshaped which companies drive the market — whether it's a durable productivity shift or a speculative narrative is still an open question.
Historical Events
Black Monday 1987 Explained
On October 19, 1987, the Dow fell about 22% in a single session with no major news to explain it, exposing how automated selling can crash a market on its own.
Historical Events
1970s Inflation Explained
A decade of oil shocks, loose monetary policy, and unanchored expectations produced stagflation — high inflation and weak growth at the same time — and set the stage for the Volcker era.
Historical Events
Volcker Shock Explained
Paul Volcker's Federal Reserve pushed interest rates toward 20% to break the inflation psychology of the 1970s, triggering a painful recession but a durable disinflation that followed for decades.
Historical Events
LTCM Crisis Explained
A hedge fund staffed with Nobel laureates nearly took down the financial system in 1998, undone by leverage and a Russian debt default its models never accounted for.
Historical Events
Flash Crash 2010 Explained
On May 6, 2010, U.S. markets plunged and mostly recovered within about half an hour, exposing how fast liquidity can vanish in an automated, fragmented market.
Historical Events
GameStop Short Squeeze Explained
In January 2021, retail traders organized on Reddit drove a heavily shorted stock to extreme highs, combining a short squeeze with a gamma squeeze and putting market structure under a spotlight that hasn't left since.