Economy

A handful of scheduled releases move almost every stock at once: the inflation reports, the monthly jobs report, the purchasing managers' surveys and the Federal Reserve's decisions and minutes. The pages here explain what each one measures, when it arrives, and which line in it deserves the most attention.

Rates reach individual holdings too, most directly through dividend stocks, whose yields compete with what safe money pays.

For a trader the practical questions are narrower than the economics. Which release lands before the open tomorrow, is it likely to move the index your positions follow, and is the figure that moves prices the headline, the core reading or a revision to last month? Each page answers those for one release, then says what the number cannot tell you, since a single month of any series carries noise that the next report may undo.