Join the Latticework AI Bootcamp and progress at your own pace. Participation is open to members and paid subscribers.
A note before we begin: This is the fifth lesson in a 16-lesson self-paced course. I did every lesson on the same tools, with the same constraints, that you will use. Some lessons will land cleanly. Some will lead to dead ends and need rework.
If you are catching up, here is what came before this lesson:
Intro: Build Your Own Investment Idea Engine
Lesson 1: How LLMs Work, and How to Defend Against Hallucinations
Lesson 2: Prompt Patterns That Outperform Casual Prompting
Lesson 3: Tools, Agents, and Structured Output
Lesson 4: SEC EDGAR, the Primary Source
Today is not about forecasting macro variables. Economists and investors alike are bad at that, and the people who are good at it do not publish their answers. The point is to control our inputs. We want to pull the live series ourselves, know the series IDs we want to track, and stop letting stale macro numbers (or stale assumptions) sit inside our investment notes.
Why This Matters for Investors
Rates, employment, money supply, CPI, sector indices, sector-specific data, and the full revision history of every series we care about all live in FRED, the St. Louis Fed’s public economic database. It is free, official, and reliable. Most of us already glance at FRED charts. What we will do in this lesson is one step better: pull the series directly into our workflow, with the IDs, the latest observation dates, and an explicit note on whether the number we are using has been revised.
Let’s launch into today’s lesson.
