Subtle & customizable audible cues to indicate when charts turnover, plus world clocks for any market — by & for professional traders
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Subtle & customizable audible cues to indicate when charts turnover, plus world clocks for any market — by & for professional traders
Open the appGuidance last reviewed 2026-09-01
A trading calendar is a list of names, and the names assume you already know what they mean. CPI. PCE. JOLTS. WASDE. Some of these move every market on the screen; some matter enormously to one instrument and not at all to anything else.
This page explains each one in plain terms: what it measures, who publishes it, when it lands, and why anyone cares. It is a reference, not advice — nothing here tells you what to do about any of it.
A release is a scheduled event, not a signal. Knowing that CPI lands on Thursday at 8:30 tells you when the market's attention will be somewhere specific. It does not tell you which way anything will go, and this page does not attempt to.
The releases that most consistently move US markets, in rough order of how much attention they get:
| Release | Who publishes it | Usual time | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Employment Situation | Bureau of Labor Statistics | 8:30 AM ET | Payrolls, unemployment rate, wage growth |
| Consumer Price Index | Bureau of Labor Statistics | 8:30 AM ET | Inflation, as most people mean the word |
| FOMC decision | Federal Reserve | 2:00 PM ET | The interest rate decision itself |
| Overseas rate decisions | Seven central banks | varies | Rate decisions that set the other half of every currency pair |
| Personal Income and Outlays | Bureau of Economic Analysis | 8:30 AM ET | Contains core PCE — the Fed's own measure |
| Jobless Claims | Department of Labor | 8:30 AM ET | Weekly. The fastest read on the labor market |
| Retail Sales | Census Bureau | 8:30 AM ET | Consumer spending, which is most of the economy |
| Producer Price Index | Bureau of Labor Statistics | 8:30 AM ET | Prices at the wholesale level |
| Gross Domestic Product | Bureau of Economic Analysis | 8:30 AM ET | The whole economy, quarterly, in three passes |
| JOLTS | Bureau of Labor Statistics | 10:00 AM ET | Job openings and quits |
| Consumer Sentiment | University of Michigan | 10:00 AM ET | Mood, and inflation expectations |
| Employment Cost Index | Bureau of Labor Statistics | 8:30 AM ET | Quarterly wage growth |
| Housing Starts | Census Bureau | 8:30 AM ET | The most rate-sensitive part of the economy |
Below that, a second group matters intensely to particular markets and barely at all to the rest: EIA inventories for energy, WASDE for grains, the COT report for futures positioning.
Release times are conventions. The agencies have published at these times for years, and they are what traders plan around — but a time is not a promise, and agencies do occasionally move one.
These are the releases that decide what the Federal Reserve does next, which is why they move nearly everything at once — stocks, bonds, the dollar, gold, and increasingly crypto.
Bureau of Labor Statistics · around the middle of the month · 8:30 AM ET · covers the previous month
CPI measures what a basket of goods and services costs a typical urban household, and it is what most people mean by "inflation." Two numbers come out together: the headline figure, which includes everything, and core, which strips out food and energy because those swing hard for reasons that have nothing to do with the broader trend.
Traders generally pay more attention to core than to headline, and to both more than to almost anything else on the calendar. The reason usually given is one step removed from the number itself: CPI feeds what the market expects the Fed to do, and rate expectations feed into the price of most other things.
It is worth knowing that CPI is a backward look. The number released in March describes February. Markets react anyway, because it changes the expected path forward.
Bureau of Economic Analysis · around the end of the month · 8:30 AM ET
This release contains core PCE, and core PCE is the measure the Federal Reserve actually targets. Not CPI — PCE. That single fact is why a release most people have never heard of matters as much as it does.
PCE and CPI measure the same idea and disagree in the detail. PCE adjusts for substitution — if beef gets expensive and people buy chicken, PCE reflects that and CPI mostly does not — and it weights healthcare differently. PCE usually runs a little cooler than CPI as a result.
It lands after CPI and after PPI, both of which feed into it, so by the time PCE arrives a good part of it is already anticipated. It is quieter in the press and often more informative.
Bureau of Labor Statistics · around the middle of the month · 8:30 AM ET
PPI measures prices at the wholesale level — what producers receive, rather than what consumers pay. It is watched for two reasons: as a possible early sign of cost pressure that reaches consumers later, and because several of its components feed directly into the PCE calculation. Analysts use PPI and CPI together to estimate PCE before PCE is published.
Smaller reaction than CPI, most of the time.
Bureau of Labor Statistics · quarterly · 8:30 AM ET
Wages and benefits, measured in a way that holds the mix of jobs constant. Average hourly earnings in the jobs report can rise simply because low-paid jobs disappeared; ECI is built to avoid that, which makes it slower but cleaner.
It is a quarterly release with a modest market reaction and an outsized influence on Fed thinking — labor costs are the part of inflation that tends to persist.
The Federal Reserve has two jobs — stable prices and maximum employment — so labor data sits alongside inflation data in importance rather than below it.
Bureau of Labor Statistics · usually the first Friday of the month · 8:30 AM ET
Commonly the largest scheduled move of the month outside an FOMC day. Three numbers come out at once:
Revisions matter more than newcomers expect. The two previous months are restated with every release, and a large revision can overwhelm the new month's number entirely.
Department of Labor · every Thursday · 8:30 AM ET
The only weekly release in this group, and that is exactly what it is for. Between the jobs report and CPI there are long stretches with no fresh labor data at all. Claims arrive every week, and a turn in the labor market tends to show here before it shows anywhere else.
Two figures: initial claims (people filing for the first time) and continuing claims (people still receiving benefits). Initial claims say how much hiring has stopped; continuing claims say how hard it has become to find the next job.
Any single week is noisy — a hurricane, a plant shutdown, an awkward holiday week. The four-week moving average is the number most people actually read.
Published by the Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration, not the BLS — an easy assumption to get wrong, since every other labor number on this page is a BLS release.
Bureau of Labor Statistics · 10:00 AM ET · covers a month that ended about six weeks earlier
Openings, hires, layoffs and quits. The quits rate is the one to know: people leave jobs voluntarily when they are confident of finding another, so it reads as a measure of worker confidence rather than of employer demand.
Two practical notes. It lands at 10:00, not 8:30 — a different time from almost everything else here. And it is the most delayed release on this page, describing a month that ended six weeks ago, which is why the reaction is usually modest.
University of Michigan · preliminary mid-month, final at month end · 10:00 AM ET
A survey rather than a count, and a private university's release rather than a government one. The headline sentiment index gets the coverage; the part traders actually watch is buried inside it — consumer inflation expectations, at one year and five to ten years out.
The Fed pays close attention to expectations, on the reasoning that inflation people expect is inflation that becomes harder to bring down. A surprising move in the expectations component can move markets when the headline index does not.
Bureau of Economic Analysis · quarterly, in three estimates · 8:30 AM ET
The whole economy in one number, published three times for each quarter: an advance estimate about a month after the quarter ends, then a second and a third as more data arrives.
The advance estimate is the one that moves markets. By the time the third arrives, the quarter is five months gone and everything in it has been reported elsewhere.
GDP is comprehensive and slow — it tells you what already happened rather than what is happening.
Census Bureau · around the middle of the month · 8:30 AM ET
Consumer spending is roughly two-thirds of the US economy, and this is the monthly read on it. The figure most watched is the control group, which excludes autos, gasoline, building materials and food services — the volatile parts — because that is the measure that feeds the GDP calculation.
Not adjusted for inflation, which matters when prices are moving: sales can rise simply because things cost more.
Census Bureau · around the middle of the month · 8:30 AM ET
Housing is the most interest-rate-sensitive part of the economy, which makes it an early indicator of what rate changes are doing in the real world. Permits lead starts — a permit is a decision to build, a start is the building beginning — so permits are the more forward-looking of the two.
Extremely noisy month to month, and weather affects it more than most series.
Not a statistical release, and the largest scheduled event on any trading calendar. It is also the one most people follow without ever being told how it actually works, so this section goes further than the rest.
The Federal Open Market Committee has twelve voting members, drawn from two different places:
The president of the New York Fed votes at every meeting, permanently. New York is where the Fed's operations in the market actually happen, which is why it is the one regional bank with a standing seat.
The other four regional votes rotate on a one-year cycle, in fixed groups:
| Group | Banks | One of them votes each year |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cleveland, Chicago | alternate |
| 2 | Boston, Philadelphia, Richmond | one per year in turn |
| 3 | Atlanta, St. Louis, Dallas | one per year in turn |
| 4 | Minneapolis, Kansas City, San Francisco | one per year in turn |
All twelve presidents attend every meeting and take part in the discussion. Only five of them vote. This matters when reading Fed commentary: a speech by a non-voting president still moves markets, because it signals where the argument inside the room is going — but that person cannot cast a vote this year.
The Committee discusses, then votes on a directive. A simple majority carries it. In practice the Chair's proposal almost always passes — a Chair who is about to be outvoted normally changes the proposal first — so the vote is less about the outcome than about the dissents.
Dissents are published by name in the statement, on the same day. One dissent is unremarkable. Two or three is genuinely unusual and is read as a sign the Committee is close to changing course. This is one of the few pieces of information in the whole release that is a fact rather than an interpretation, and it is why traders read the last paragraph of the statement before the rest.
| What | When | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| The statement | 2:00 PM ET on decision day | The rate, plus wording compared line by line against the previous one |
| The dot plot / SEP | With the statement, four times a year — March, June, September, December | Each participant's own projection for rates, growth, unemployment and inflation |
| The press conference | 2:30 PM ET | Often moves markets more than the statement, because it is unscripted |
| The minutes | Three weeks later, 2:00 PM ET | The argument behind the vote, in far more detail |
| The Beige Book | Two weeks before each meeting, 2:00 PM ET | Anecdotal business conditions from all twelve districts |
The dot plot is the part people most often find hard to read. It is a scatter of anonymous dots — one per participant, including the non-voters — showing where each thinks the policy rate should be at the end of each of the next few years. It is not a promise, it is not a forecast of what the Committee will do, and participants move their own dots between meetings. It is still the single most scrutinised chart in macro, because it is the closest thing to seeing the whole room's opinion at once.
Fed officials stop commenting publicly from the second Saturday before a meeting until the Thursday after it. That is roughly ten days of silence before every decision.
This is scheduled silence, not a signal. A week with no Fed speakers in it before a decision looks meaningful and is not — it is a rule. Chart Ding puts blackout starts on the calendar for exactly this reason.
Everything else on this page is an input to the Fed's decision. The Fed's decision is an input to the price of every asset that has a discount rate in it, which is all of them. That is the chain traders describe when explaining why an FOMC afternoon tends to look different from any other afternoon of the month — commonly thin trading into 2:00, a sharp few minutes after it, and often a second move at 2:30 once the Chair starts answering questions.
For currencies, one central bank is half a story. Exchange rates respond to rate differentials — the gap between what two currencies pay — so a euro-dollar trader following only the Fed is following one side of their own pair.
Which banks matter is settled by which currencies actually trade rather than by the size of the economy. The BIS triennial survey puts the US dollar on roughly 88% of all foreign exchange trades, then the euro at about 30%, the yen 17%, sterling 13%, the renminbi 7%, the Australian and Canadian dollars around 6% each, and the Swiss franc about 5%.
| Bank | Meetings a year | Announcement | In US Eastern |
|---|---|---|---|
| European Central Bank | 8 | 14:15 Frankfurt, press conference 14:45 | Early morning, roughly 90 minutes before the US open |
| Bank of England | 8 | 12:00 London, always a Thursday | Mid-morning |
| Bank of Japan | 8 | When the meeting ends, usually around midday Tokyo | The previous evening |
| Reserve Bank of Australia | 8 | 14:30 Sydney, a Tuesday | The previous evening |
| Bank of Canada | 8 | 09:45 Toronto | 9:45 AM — the same clock as New York |
| Swiss National Bank | 4 | 09:30 Zurich | Early morning |
| Reserve Bank of New Zealand | 8 | 14:00 Wellington | The previous evening |
Germany does not have its own rate decision. This is the question that comes up first, and the answer is that the Bundesbank is part of the Eurosystem — the ECB sets policy for the whole euro area. The German central bank, for the purpose of a trading calendar, is the ECB row above.
China is absent even though the renminbi is the fifth most-traded currency. The People's Bank of China does not hold scheduled policy meetings in the Western sense. It sets the Loan Prime Rate monthly and moves other rates without a fixed calendar, so there is no announcement date to put on a calendar at all. That is a real gap and it is worth naming rather than papering over.
Sweden, Norway, Mexico, Brazil and India all have real central banks with published schedules. They are absent for a simpler reason: each is a much smaller share of turnover, and each is another list that has to be kept current. They are candidates, not oversights.
The ECB's US Eastern time moves twice a year, and not when America's does. Europe changes its clocks on the last Sunday of March and October; the US changes on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November. For a couple of weeks each spring and autumn the usual gap is an hour different — so an ECB decision that is 8:15 AM ET in September is 9:15 AM ET in late October. Chart Ding computes each one against the real calendar rather than assuming a fixed offset.
Only one of the seven publishes its announcement time as a commitment. The Swiss National Bank prints 09:30 against each assessment on its own schedule. The other six announce at a time that is long-standing practice rather than a published promise, and the Bank of Japan does not have one at all — its statement comes out when the meeting finishes, which has ranged from before 11:30 to after 13:00 in Tokyo. A late BOJ release is itself widely noticed, on the reasoning that a contested vote takes longer. Any time shown for those six — ours included — is an approximation, and it is marked as one.
Three of them reach US traders the night before. Tokyo, Sydney and Wellington are far enough ahead that a midday announcement there is late evening in New York. Those decisions land while US markets are closed and show up in the futures. A calendar that filed them under their local date would put them a day after you could have acted on them, so they appear on the US date instead, with the bank's own local date shown alongside.
All seven publish their dates a year or more ahead, and all seven are free to read. None of them publishes an API, so these dates are read from each bank's own calendar by hand and carry the date they were last checked.
Everything above moves markets broadly. These move one thing hard and everything else not at all — which is precisely why they are worth knowing about if you trade that thing, and safe to ignore if you do not.
Energy Information Administration · Wednesday 10:30 AM ET (crude) and Thursday 10:30 AM ET (natural gas)
How much crude oil, gasoline and distillate is sitting in US storage, and how much natural gas. For anyone trading energy futures this is the week's event; for anyone trading equities it is nearly invisible unless the move is large enough to drag energy stocks with it.
When a Monday holiday falls in the week, the reports shift a day later.
US Department of Agriculture · monthly, usually between the 9th and 12th · 12:00 PM ET
The name is opaque and the report is not. WASDE is the USDA's monthly estimate of global supply and demand for the major crops — corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice — and for livestock and dairy. It sets the reference numbers that the entire agricultural futures complex trades against.
It is widely described as the most important scheduled event in the grain markets, and it lands at noon Eastern rather than in the morning, which is unusual enough to catch people out. Limit moves in corn and soybeans on a WASDE day are not unusual.
If you do not trade agriculture, this one genuinely does not affect you.
Commodity Futures Trading Commission · Friday 3:30 PM ET, reporting positions as of the previous Tuesday
Not an economic indicator at all — a positioning report. It breaks down who holds futures positions in each market, split into commercial hedgers, large speculators and small traders.
The three-day lag is the thing to understand about it: by Friday afternoon you are reading Tuesday's positioning, and in a fast week that is a long time. Traders generally refer to it when discussing how crowded a position has become; the lag makes it a poor fit for anything shorter-term.
Baker Hughes · Friday 1:00 PM ET
How many drilling rigs are active in the US. A rough proxy for future oil and gas production, watched in energy markets and nowhere else. Fifteen minutes of attention on a Friday afternoon.
Institute for Supply Management · first business day (manufacturing) and third (services) · 10:00 AM ET
Survey-based readings of business activity, where 50 is the line between expansion and contraction. Widely followed, and notable for being private releases rather than government statistics — which is exactly why they are not on the Chart Ding calendar, since the free public feed we build the calendar from does not carry them.
The services reading covers far more of the US economy than the manufacturing one, though manufacturing gets more coverage.
ADP · usually the Wednesday before the jobs report · 8:15 AM ET
A payroll processor's estimate of private employment, published two days before the official number. It is treated as a preview, and it has a mixed record as one — ADP and the BLS use different methods and regularly disagree, sometimes by a lot.
Also private, and also therefore not on our calendar.
US Treasury · times vary, commonly 1:00 PM ET
The government sells debt on a published schedule, and how well each auction goes moves the bond market. Mostly the concern of rates traders; occasionally a weak auction is large enough news to move stocks.
The market calendar carries every release in the first three groups above, plus FOMC dates, expirations, futures rolls, index rebalances, holidays and clock changes. Release dates come from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), which publishes the official agency schedules, and are refreshed automatically.
Everything in the "one market" section above is not currently on it. ISM and ADP are private releases that the public feed does not carry; the energy, agriculture and positioning reports come from separate government sources, each of which is its own piece of work. They are described here because a calendar you have to look things up to read is not much of a calendar — and because a trader deciding whether our calendar covers what they need deserves a straight answer about what is on it and what is not.
Inside the app, the calendar can be filtered to what a particular kind of trader watches, and per-event alerts can be switched on individually.
None of this is a rule and none of it is a recommendation. These are simply the things experienced traders tend to bring up when they talk about scheduled releases.
Most attention goes to the gap, not the level. A release is generally compared against what forecasters were expecting, so a figure landing close to expectations often draws less comment than one that does not — whether the number itself was strong or weak.
Revisions get read as closely as the new figure. Most monthly series restate the previous month or two with each release, and a large revision is frequently discussed more than the headline.
A scheduled release is a date everybody already has. It is on every calendar, including everyone else's. What a calendar offers is not an advantage over other people — it is not being caught out by something that was published a year ahead.
Chart Ding is a market clock with customizable alarms for traders — candle-close alerts, world market sessions, and holiday warnings. Open the app.
Nothing on this website is trading or investment advice. Chart Ding is a market clock and alarm tool — it does not recommend trades, evaluate strategies, or take account of anyone's circumstances. Nothing here should be construed as a recommendation or relied on as the basis for a trading decision. Consult a licensed professional before placing real money at risk. Trading involves risk of loss.