Reading a release

A row is one scheduled release. Twelve columns describe it, arranged in four groups that answer four questions in order: what is it and when, what did it print, how does that compare, and how much noise should you expect around it.

Event info — what it is and when

• Time — in your saved timezone, or “All Day” for entries with no fixed minute — bank holidays and multi-day meetings.
• Country — the flag and the economy the figure describes.
• Currency — usually the faster way to find what moves your instrument. The Filters popover offers only the currencies that actually appear in the range you are looking at, commonest first — so a currency you can pick is never one that empties the table by itself.
• Impact — the tier, drawn as a coloured mark with the word beside it.
• Event — the release name together with the period it covers — “CPI m/m (Jul)” rather than a bare “CPI”, so two prints of the same series are not the same string.

The four impact tiers

• High — the releases worth arranging a session around, and the only ones the one-press toolbar filter keeps.
• Medium — worth knowing about; capable of moving a session but rarely defining it.
• Low — scheduled, published, and usually background.
• Holiday — not a release at all — a market closure or a bank holiday. It carries no forecast, no previous figure and no volatility, so its row is em dashes by construction rather than by omission.

The tier is always written next to its mark rather than encoded only in the colour, so the row still reads if red and orange are hard for you to tell apart.

Release and Comparison — the figures

• Actual — what was published, once it has been.
• Forecast — what economists expected before the print.
• Previous — the figure for the period before this one.
• Surprise — the signed gap between Actual and Forecast, as a percentage. A beat and a miss are toned differently, and the sign is what carries it.

Whether a beat reads as good news is decided when the figure is stored rather than by comparing the two numbers on screen. A higher unemployment rate is not a better one, and inferring direction from arithmetic alone would colour half the calendar backwards.

What is filled in today, and what is not

The schedule Alltra reads publishes the calendar itself — the times, the impact tiers, the forecasts and the previous figures — and does not publish the printed figure. So Actual and Surprise show an em dash on every row, and will keep doing so until a second source lands those numbers. Nothing is estimated into them in the meantime, because an invented print is worse than an empty column.

The Volatility meter in the Meta group is in the same position for a different reason: no expected-volatility figure is published for these releases, so the meter is drawn at the same level for every scheduled row and carries no information. Read the Impact tier instead. A holiday lights none of its bars, which is the one case where the meter says something true.

Coverage runs about three weeks — roughly last week, this week and the week ahead. Set the range further out than that and the table comes back empty. That is the schedule Alltra actually holds rather than a fault, and it is why the four empty-state messages name the date range first.

A missing figure is a dash, never a zero

This is a rule across the whole product and it is worth knowing here because this page shows more dashes than most. A speech has no forecast. A holiday has no print. An unreleased number has no actual. In every one of those cases the cell holds an em dash, because writing 0 would be a claim about the figure rather than an admission that there is not one.

Session

Which trading session the release falls in: Sydney, Tokyo, Frankfurt, London or New York, plus Holiday. It is a property of the moment the release lands, not of where you are — so it reads the same for every trader regardless of the timezone their times are drawn in. Where sessions overlap, as London and New York do for four hours a day, one of them wins consistently, so filtering by session gives the same rows every time you ask. The Session filter offers the five market sessions only; Holiday is a value a row can carry but not a pill you can press.

The detail panel

Click the event name, or choose View details from the row’s ⋯ menu, and the release opens in a panel from the right. It reads top to bottom in one scroll rather than splitting into tabs: the flag, currency, impact and session across the top with the release time as the headline figure, then the four release figures as ruled rows, then the day around it.

• Today at a glance — how many high, medium and low impact releases sit alongside this one, and the total.
• Up next — the next few high and medium impact releases after this one. Low impact and holidays are left out, because the list answers “what else should I be flat for”.

Opening something from Up next stacks a second panel over the first rather than replacing it, so the release you came from is still behind you and Escape walks back one level at a time.