LESSON 1 / 6 · 8 MIN
FRED and ECONOMICS: the data nobody opens
Chart inflation, unemployment or the Fed's balance sheet as easily as you chart Apple.
FRED is the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis database — the reference source for US economic data. TradingView carries 1,306 of its series as ordinary symbols. You type FRED:UNRATE in the search box the same way you type AAPL, and you get the unemployment rate on a chart.
| Symbol | What it is | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| FRED:CPIAUCSL | Consumer price index (headline) | Monthly |
| FRED:CPILFESL | Core CPI (ex food and energy) | Monthly |
| FRED:PCEPILFE | Core PCE — the one the Fed actually targets | Monthly |
| FRED:UNRATE | Unemployment rate | Monthly |
| FRED:PAYEMS | Nonfarm payrolls (level, not change) | Monthly |
| FRED:ICSA | Initial jobless claims | Weekly |
| FRED:T10Y2Y | Yield curve: 10-year minus 2-year | Daily |
| FRED:DFF | Fed funds rate | Daily |
| FRED:WALCL | Fed balance sheet, total assets | Weekly |
| FRED:USREC | NBER recession indicator (1 or 0) | Monthly |
There is a second catalogue: ECONOMICS, with roughly 9,000 indicators covering the whole world — around 200 for the US alone. The format is country code plus indicator code: ECONOMICS:USINTR is the US interest rate, ECONOMICS:DEINTR the German one.
Key idea
Why this matters more than any indicator in module 4: a moving average is a transformation of the price you were already looking at. Unemployment is not. It is genuinely new information — the only kind that can confirm anything.
Practice
Open SPX on monthly, hit 'All', and add FRED:UNRATE as a second series (Indicators → Compare, or the '+' next to the symbol). Eighty years of stock market and unemployment on the same screen — and the shape of that relationship is the subject of the next four lessons.