Market Timing & Calendar Terms
Two questions sit underneath most of the terminal's news and mover views: when is this happening, and how does it compare to what was already expected? The four terms here cover both. FedWatch and impact rating describe upcoming events before they happen; actual vs forecast describes what happened once they did; and session scoping determines which trading window a given list of movers is even drawn from.
FedWatch
FedWatch shows the market-implied probability of each possible outcome at an upcoming Federal Reserve meeting, derived from where fed funds futures are currently pricing rather than from any survey of what economists or Fed officials themselves expect. If futures pricing implies an 80% chance of a quarter-point cut and a 20% chance of no change, that's the market's own collective bet, built from real money positioned in the futures market, not a poll of opinions. Reading it well means treating the percentages as fluid rather than settled. They shift with every piece of incoming economic data between now and the meeting, sometimes sharply around a single inflation print or jobs report, so a probability snapshot from a week ago can already be stale. FedWatch also only covers the next scheduled decision at a time; for how those odds have moved recently and whether they still line up with the Fed's own longer-range projections, that's a separate read covered on the methodology page.
Impact rating
An impact rating is a calendar event's expected market significance, shown as a simple high, medium, or low tag so a busy economic calendar can be scanned quickly for what actually matters that day. A high-impact rating generally goes to releases with a track record of moving markets on surprise, things like a Fed rate decision or a nonfarm payrolls report, while routine or narrowly-watched releases carry a low rating even if they're relevant to a specific sector. The rating describes typical significance, not what will happen this time. A historically low-impact release can still move markets if its number comes in far enough from what was expected, and a high-impact event can pass quietly if the actual figure lines up closely with the forecast. Treat the rating as a filter for where to look first, not a guarantee of how much a given release will actually move anything.
Actual vs forecast
Actual vs forecast is the comparison between a released economic figure and what economists surveyed beforehand expected it to be, and it's usually the surprise, not the raw number itself, that moves markets. A jobs report showing modest growth can still shake markets hard if the consensus forecast was for much stronger growth, since the market had already priced in the higher expectation before the release. The size of the gap between actual and forecast matters more than either number in isolation, and the direction of the surprise, better or worse than expected, tends to matter more than whether the underlying figure was, in some absolute sense, good or bad for the economy. Forecasts themselves are also just a consensus average across economists, not a guaranteed baseline, so a wide range of individual estimates behind a single consensus number is another layer of context this comparison alone doesn't show.
Session (Reg / Pre / Post / O/N)
Session scoping determines which trading window a mover list, like gainers, losers, or volume leaders, is drawing its numbers from: Regular hours, Pre-market, Post-market (also called After Hours), or Overnight. The same ticker can look completely different depending which session a list is scoped to, since pre-market and overnight trading run on a small fraction of regular-session volume, which means a modest dollar amount can move a stock's price by a much larger percentage than the same dollar amount would during the regular session. That thinner liquidity is the main thing to keep in mind switching between sessions. A gap that looks dramatic on a pre-market mover list can shrink, or even reverse, once regular trading opens and the far deeper liquidity of the full market session takes over, so a pre-market or overnight read is best treated as an early, thin-volume signal rather than a settled outcome.
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