The Challenge
FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) contains over 800,000 data series. Most are too obscure, too narrow, or lack sufficient history to be useful for market analysis. We needed a systematic way to identify the indicators that matter.
Our Selection Criteria
Every indicator on MarketCharts must pass four tests:
Historical Depth
We require data going back to at least 1993, when SPY began trading. This gives us 30+ years of history to overlay economic data with S&P 500 price action, covering multiple business cycles and market regimes.
Appropriate Frequency
We focus on weekly, monthly, and quarterly releases. Daily data is too noisy for trend analysis, and the most market-moving economic data is released on these slower cadences anyway.
Market Relevance
Not every government statistic moves markets. We prioritize indicators that economists and traders watch: employment, inflation, growth, and sentiment measures that appear in research and financial media.
Official Sources Only
All data comes directly from government agencies through FRED. We don't estimate, seasonally adjust, or modify anything. What you see is exactly what BLS, BEA, Census, or the Fed released.
Discovery Process
We built a script that queries FRED's release calendar daily. For each release, it identifies series meeting our criteria and ranks them by FRED's popularity metric, a proxy for how often economists and analysts reference the data.
The script shows us what we're tracking versus what high-value series we might be missing. This helps us expand coverage systematically without adding noise.
The Result
We track indicators across labor markets, inflation, economic growth, consumer activity, housing, financial conditions, and business activity. Each one earned its place by meeting all four criteria.
The goal is signal over noise. Every chart on MarketCharts should provide real insight into economic conditions and their relationship with market movements.