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A note before we begin: This is the fifth lesson in a four-week experiment. I am doing every lesson alongside you, on the same tools, with the same constraints. Some days will land cleanly. Some will lead to dead ends and need rework. We’ll figure out what works, together.
If you are catching up, here’s what came before today’s 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 Economists and investors alike are bad at that, and the people who are good at it do not publish their answers.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 this week 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.
