Free course · Economics · Beginner
Macro Weather for Stock Pickers: Economic Data and Stocks
A free beginner course on economic data and stocks. It covers what the big releases measure, how rates reach valuations, how jobs and orders reach revenue, and a checklist that turns the calendar into research questions.
Who it is for
Stock investors who see the economic calendar every week and want to know which releases should change how they look at their own holdings.
By the end you can
- Tell a market-moving release from a minor one by what it says about rates and profits
- Size how far a release landed from its forecast and what that gap adds up to over a year
- Work out how a one-point change in the discount rate moves a simple valuation
- Trace a slowdown in consumer spending into a company's revenue growth
- Run a short macro checklist that turns the calendar into questions for company research
The lessons
- 01 The Economic Releases That Move Markets
Market moving economic releases sorted by one test: do they change expected interest rates or profits? Plus how to size a surprise against the forecast.
About 12 minutes, with a quiz at the end
- 02 Interest Rates, Inflation and What They Do to Stock Valuations
How interest rates and stock valuations connect through the discount rate, worked on a simple growth formula, and why long-duration growth stocks feel it most.
About 13 minutes, with a quiz at the end
- 03 Jobs, Spending and PMI: Economic Data That Reaches Earnings
How economic data and earnings connect: jobs feed incomes, incomes feed spending, spending becomes revenue, and PMI orders show demand before it reaches sales.
About 13 minutes, with a quiz at the end
- 04 A Macro Checklist for Stocks: The Dollar, Credit and Rates
A macro checklist for stocks covering rates, inflation, jobs, PMI orders, credit spreads and the dollar, with the sum for a strong dollar's hit to foreign sales.
About 12 minutes, with a quiz at the end
The economic calendar on most trading platforms is a long table: a time, a country, a release name, a forecast, the prior reading, and a column that fills in with the actual number the second it prints. Most stock pickers skim it. Then a morning comes when every holding opens lower with no company news at all, and the only thing that changed overnight was one row on that table, which is usually when someone decides it’s time to learn what the rows mean.
Who it suits
The course is for investors and swing traders who pick individual stocks and want economic data to inform those picks. Knowing what revenue, earnings per share and a P/E ratio mean on a quote page is enough to start. Everything else gets built from there.
Beginners are welcome. The arithmetic stays on hypothetical companies with round numbers, and each sum is laid out line by line so you can redo it with figures from your own watchlist and see whether your holdings behave the way the example does.
What to have open
Keep an economic calendar in one tab, any version that shows the forecast beside the actual. In a second tab, open the quote page of a stock you own. Pick one whose business you know well enough to say who its customers are and where they live, because the lessons keep asking the same two questions of both tabs: what does this release say about interest rates, and what does it say about this company’s sales?
A notebook helps. Use it to log which releases touch which holdings.
How to work through it
Take the lessons in order. Each leans on the last. The early material sorts releases by what they tell you about rates and profits and shows how a surprise is measured, and the middle carries those surprises into valuations and revenue with worked sums on a hypothetical discount rate and a hypothetical company’s sensitivity to consumer spending, before the course closes on a checklist you can run each month.
Every lesson ends with a short quiz. A wrong answer there is useful. It shows exactly which link between the data and the stock price you skipped.
Budget about an hour in total. If the calendar table itself is new to you, the walkthrough on how to read an economic calendar makes a good companion.
What it leaves out
Bond trading and currencies get only the depth a stock investor needs. You’ll see how bond yields feed a discount rate and how a stronger dollar shrinks foreign sales on translation, and that’s where it stops. There’s nothing on forecasting releases yourself, and nothing on trading the seconds after a number prints, which is a separate game played with faster tools.
No calls on where the economy is heading, either. Nobody knows that in advance.
Where to go after
Two pages extend the material directly. The entry on initial jobless claims covers the weekly labor number, and the argument for reading PMI new orders before the headline PMI goes deeper on business surveys. If you hold stocks through their reports, Beat, Raise and Still Drop picks up where the economy hands off to the company’s own numbers, and the economics hub collects the rest of the reading.
People also ask
Do I need an economics background to use economic data for stocks?
No. If you can read revenue, EPS and a price-to-earnings multiple off a quote page, you have enough to start. The rest is a chain you can follow: a release changes what investors expect for interest rates or company sales, and those expectations change what they will pay for a share today.
Should I trade stocks in the minutes after a big economic release?
The first minutes after a release are a speed contest with wide swings and thin order books. A stock picker gets more from knowing which releases are due, sizing positions so a rough morning is survivable, and using the data to ask sharper questions about the companies held.