लुकअहेड पक्षपात के बिना FRED मैक्रो डेटा का विश्लेषण

# 06_fred_macro_eda.py


```py
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# %% [markdown]
# # Macro Data Loading: FRED Economic Series
#
# **Chapter 4: Fundamental and Alternative Data**
# **Docker image**: `ml4t`
# **Section Reference**: Section 4.3 (Fundamentals Across the Asset-Class Spectrum)
#
# ## Purpose
#
# The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis publishes several hundred thousand economic time series
# through a service called FRED, free and without registration for bulk snapshots. A handful of
# them describe the conditions every strategy in this book operates under: what money costs,
# what the market pays for insurance against a fall, how many people are working.
#
# The engineering problem is that these series are released on different clocks. Treasury yields
# publish every business day, jobless claims every Thursday, the unemployment rate on one Friday
# a month, GDP once a quarter and then revised twice. A model that consumes them daily has to
# decide what a monthly series is worth on the twenty days between its releases, and getting
# that decision wrong is the most common way macro features leak the future.
#
# This notebook reads the panel the book ships, establishes what is actually in it, and shows
# how to recover each series' release cadence from a file that has already flattened them onto
# one grid.
#
# ## Learning Objectives
#
# After completing this notebook, you will be able to:
#
# - Load the shipped macro panel and say what date grid its rows sit on.
# - Read the metadata table that names each series, describes it, and states how often its
#   source publishes it.
# - Recover a series' true release cadence by counting how often its value changes, rather than
#   trusting a row count that a forward fill has already made uniform.
# - Chart a yield curve, a volatility index and a curve spread, and mark the policy events that
#   moved them.
# - Check a derived column against the formula its metadata declares.
# - Say why carrying the last released value forward is the only fill that is safe for a
#   backtest, and what it costs.
#
# ## Prerequisites
#
# The panel ships with the book as a parquet file and needs no API key. `load_macro` raises
# `DataNotFoundError` naming the download command if it is missing.
#
# ## Cross-References
#
# - **Upstream**: `macro/fred_macro.parquet` under `DATA_DIR`
# - **Downstream**: [`07_macro_data_alignment`](07_macro_data_alignment.ipynb) (aligning these
#   series to a trading calendar with release lags)
# - **Related**: `08_financial_features/04_fundamentals_macro_calendar.py` (macro regime features)

# %%
"""Macro Data Loading: FRED Economic Series - load and explore macroeconomic time series from FRED."""

import statistics

import plotly.express as px
import plotly.graph_objects as go
import polars as pl
from plotly.subplots import make_subplots

from data import load_macro, load_macro_metadata
from utils.style import COLORS, show_plotly_with_alt

# %% [markdown]
# Every chart below the first covers a recent window rather than the whole history, because the
# events worth annotating are recent and a twenty-six year axis hides them. The window opens at
# the start of 2020 so that the COVID shock, the tightening cycle that followed it and the
# subsequent easing are all inside one frame.

# %% tags=["parameters"]
RECENT_START = "2020-01-01"  # left edge of every windowed chart below

# %% [markdown]
# ## 1. The panel and its grid
#
# The first thing to establish about any panel is what one row means. Here a row is a calendar
# date, including weekends and holidays, which is a choice the shipped file makes rather than
# something FRED does: markets are shut on those days and no series is published.

# %%
macro = load_macro().sort("timestamp")

first_date, last_date = macro["timestamp"].min(), macro["timestamp"].max()
print(f"Rows: {len(macro):,}")
print(f"Columns: {len(macro.columns) - 1} series")
print(f"Span: {first_date} to {last_date}")
print(f"Calendar days in that span: {(last_date - first_date).days + 1:,}")

# %% [markdown]
# Row count equal to calendar days is what says the grid is every date rather than every trading
# session. That matters twice over: a weekend row carries Friday's value rather than a new
# observation, and any statistic computed per row, a daily return for instance, will count two
# zero-change days a week that were never trading days at all.

# %% [markdown]
# ## 2. What each series is
#
# The panel ships with a metadata table, and reading it is cheaper than guessing what a lowercase
# eight-character column name refers to. `native_frequency` is how often the source publishes;
# `kind` separates a series FRED publishes from one this repository computes; `formula` gives the
# arithmetic where there is any.

# %%
meta = load_macro_metadata()
meta.select("series", "description", "native_frequency", "kind", "formula")

# %% [markdown]
# Grouping the metadata by how often each series is published separates the panel into its
# release clocks and the derived columns. That grouping is the whole difficulty of macro data in
# one table.

# %%
meta.group_by("native_frequency").agg(
    pl.len().alias("n_series"), pl.col("series").sort().alias("series")
).sort("n_series", descending=True)

# %% [markdown]
# ## 3. Treasury yields
#
# A Treasury yield is what the US government pays to borrow for a stated term, quoted as an
# annual percentage. The two-year and the ten-year are the pair most often read together: the
# two-year moves with what the market expects the Federal Reserve to do over the next couple of
# years, while the ten-year carries expectations about growth and inflation far beyond the
# current policy cycle. The distance between them is the subject of Part 5.

# %%
yields = macro.select("timestamp", "dgs2", "dgs10").drop_nulls()
print(f"Observations with both yields: {len(yields):,}")
print(f"Last date in this snapshot: {yields['timestamp'].max()}")
yields.tail(3)

# %% [markdown]
# The chart below is drawn on the recent window rather than the full panel, because the
# tightening cycle is the episode the rest of this notebook refers back to. The annotations mark
# the decisions that bound it, the first and the last increase of the cycle. An annotation has
# nothing to point at once the window opens after its date, so each is placed only where the
# window contains it. The cell after the figure prints each yield on those two days, and says so
# where the window excludes one, so a missing annotation has its explanation beside it.

# %%
yields_recent = yields.filter(pl.col("timestamp") >= pl.lit(RECENT_START).str.to_date())
yields_pd = yields_recent.to_pandas()

fig = go.Figure()
for column, label, color in [
    ("dgs2", "2-year Treasury", COLORS["copper"]),
    ("dgs10", "10-year Treasury", COLORS["blue"]),
]:
    fig.add_trace(
        go.Scatter(
            x=yields_pd["timestamp"],
            y=yields_pd[column],
            mode="lines",
            name=label,
            line=dict(color=color, width=1.5),
        )
    )
for date, label in [
    ("2022-03-16", "First increase of the cycle"),
    ("2023-07-26", "Last increase of the cycle"),
]:
    # An event outside the window this chart opens on has nothing to point at.
    at_date = yields_pd.loc[yields_pd["timestamp"].astype(str) == date, "dgs2"]
    if at_date.empty:
        continue
    fig.add_annotation(
        x=date,
        y=float(at_date.iloc[0]),
        text=label,
        showarrow=True,
        arrowhead=2,
        ax=30,
        ay=-40,
    )
fig.update_layout(
    title="Two- and ten-year Treasury yields, with the tightening cycle marked",
    xaxis_title="Date",
    yaxis_title="Yield (% per year)",
    height=400,
    legend=dict(orientation="h", yanchor="bottom", y=1.02, xanchor="center", x=0.5),
)
show_plotly_with_alt(
    fig,
    "Line chart of the two-year and ten-year Treasury yields over the recent window, in percent "
    "per year, against a shared date axis. The first and last policy increases of the tightening "
    "cycle are annotated where the window contains them.",
)

# %%
# A date the window excludes is reported, not skipped in silence.
for _label, _at in (("first increase", "2022-03-16"), ("last increase", "2023-07-26")):
    _row = yields_recent.filter(pl.col("timestamp") == pl.lit(_at).str.to_date())
    if len(_row):
        print(
            f"{_label:<16} {_at}   2-year {_row['dgs2'][0]:.2f}%   10-year {_row['dgs10'][0]:.2f}%"
        )
    else:
        print(f"{_label:<16} {_at}   outside the plotted window, so it carries no annotation")

# %% [markdown]
# Where the window contains both dates, the rows printed above are each yield on the day the
# cycle began and the day it ended. They are worth reading as a pair because the two legs need
# not move together: the policy rate is the thing being set, the two-year tracks expectations
# about it over a horizon short enough for those expectations to dominate, and the ten-year
# carries much more besides. Part 5 makes the distance between them its subject. Where a row
# reports its date as excluded instead, the window opens after that end of the cycle and there
# is no pair; widen it by moving `RECENT_START` back.

# %% [markdown]
# ## 4. The VIX
#
# The VIX is the volatility the S&P 500 option market is pricing for the next thirty days,
# quoted as an annualized percentage. It is not a forecast anyone made; it is what has to be
# assumed about future volatility for the observed option prices to be fair. It rises when
# demand for protection rises, which is why it is read as a measure of how frightened the market
# is rather than of how volatile it has been.

# %% [markdown]
# The levels below are the ones the market conventionally reads as boundaries between a calm
# regime, an unsettled one and a frightened one. They are declared once: the figure draws them,
# each label formats its own number from the level it marks, and the counts printed after the
# figure are taken at the same two levels, so nothing here can disagree with anything else.

# %%
VIX_BANDS = [
    (20, "Unsettled", COLORS["neutral"]),
    (30, "Frightened", COLORS["slate"]),
]

vix = macro.select("timestamp", "vixcls").drop_nulls()
print(f"Observations: {len(vix):,}")
print(f"Mean over the full history: {vix['vixcls'].mean():.1f}")
print(f"Highest value in the history: {vix['vixcls'].max():.1f}")
print(f"Date it was reached: {vix.filter(pl.col('vixcls') == vix['vixcls'].max())['timestamp'][0]}")

# %% [markdown]
# The two reference lines mark the levels the market conventionally treats as the boundary
# between a calm regime, an unsettled one and a frightened one. They are conventions rather than
# thresholds anything is computed from, and the reason to draw them is that "calm" and
# "frightened" are otherwise opinions about a line.

# %%
vix_recent = vix.filter(pl.col("timestamp") >= pl.lit(RECENT_START).str.to_date())
vix_pd = vix_recent.to_pandas()

fig = go.Figure()
fig.add_trace(
    go.Scatter(
        x=vix_pd["timestamp"],
        y=vix_pd["vixcls"],
        mode="lines",
        name="VIX",
        line=dict(color=COLORS["amber"], width=1.5),
        fill="tozeroy",
        fillcolor="rgba(212, 168, 75, 0.15)",  # translucent COLORS["amber"]
    )
)
for level, reading, color in VIX_BANDS:
    # The number is formatted from the level itself, so a changed threshold cannot leave the
    # label announcing the old one.
    label = f"{reading} above {level:g}"
    fig.add_hline(
        y=level,
        line_dash="dash",
        line_color=color,
        annotation_text=label,
        annotation_position="right",
    )
for date, label in [
    ("2020-03-16", "COVID crash"),
    ("2023-03-13", "Silicon Valley Bank fails"),
]:
    at_date = vix_pd.loc[vix_pd["timestamp"].astype(str) == date, "vixcls"]
    if at_date.empty:
        continue
    fig.add_annotation(
        x=date, y=float(at_date.iloc[0]), text=label, showarrow=True, arrowhead=2, ax=0, ay=-30
    )
fig.update_layout(
    title="VIX with conventional bands and annotated market episodes",
    xaxis_title="Date",
    yaxis_title="VIX (annualized % volatility)",
    height=400,
    showlegend=False,
    margin=dict(r=140),
)
show_plotly_with_alt(
    fig,
    "Filled line chart of the VIX over the recent window, in annualized percent volatility, "
    "with dashed horizontal rules at the conventional band levels. Named market episodes are "
    "annotated where the window contains their dates.",
)

# %% [markdown]
# The usual summary of this series is that it spends most of its life below the lower band and
# only days at a time above the upper one. Both halves are countable against those same two
# levels, over the plotted window and over the full history, so the cell below counts them.

# %%
_below, _above = VIX_BANDS[0][0], VIX_BANDS[1][0]


def spells_above(values: list[float], level: float) -> list[int]:
    """Lengths of the consecutive runs in *values* that sit above *level*.

    Counted in rows, and a row of this panel is a calendar day: the weekends and holidays the
    VIX is not published on are forward-filled rather than absent, so a run of `n` rows is `n`
    calendar days and fewer trading sessions. Which rows are fills cannot be recovered from the
    panel, because a session that closes at the previous day's level looks the same.
    """
    runs, run = [], 0
    for x in values:
        if x > level:
            run += 1
        else:
            if run:
                runs.append(run)
            run = 0
    return runs + ([run] if run else [])


for _label, _frame in (("full history", vix), ("plotted window", vix_recent)):
    _v = _frame["vixcls"]
    _runs = spells_above(_v.to_list(), _above)
    _spells = (
        f"spells above {_above:g}: none"
        if not _runs
        else (
            f"spells above {_above:g}: {len(_runs)}, "
            f"median {statistics.median(_runs):g}, longest {max(_runs)} calendar days"
        )
    )
    print(
        f"{_label:<15} below {_below:g}: {(_v < _below).mean():>6.1%}   "
        f"above {_above:g}: {(_v > _above).mean():>6.1%}   {_spells}"
    )

# %% [markdown]
# The spell lengths are in calendar days, because that is what a row of this panel is. "The panel
# and its grid" above established that; this is the first place it changes a number, and it would
# change any other window stated in rows the same way.

# %% [markdown]
# Read the median and the longest spell together rather than either alone. A median describes the
# typical episode and says nothing about the worst one, which is the episode a risk model exists
# for. The two rows give both statistics over the full history and over the plotted window, so
# comparing them is what says whether the chart contains the tail: where the window's longest
# spell is the shorter of the two, the worst episode in the record falls outside the figure, and
# no amount of looking at the figure will tell the reader that.

# %% [markdown]
# ## 5. The yield curve spread, and checking a derived column
#
# Subtract the two-year yield from the ten-year and you have the slope of the curve. It is
# normally positive, because lending for longer usually earns more. When it goes negative the
# curve is **inverted**: the market is paying more to lend for two years than for ten, which
# happens when it expects the policy rate to be cut substantially before the ten years are up.
# Every US recession since 1970 has been preceded by an inversion, which is why the spread is
# watched even though the lead time between the two has ranged from months to years.
#
# The panel carries this quantity twice. `t10y2y` is FRED's own published spread series, and
# `YIELD_CURVE_SLOPE` is computed in this repository from the formula its metadata declares.
# Two columns for one quantity is worth a check rather than a comment, because a derived column
# whose formula has drifted from its description is invisible until something built on it is
# wrong.

# %%
declared_formula = meta.filter(pl.col("series") == "YIELD_CURVE_SLOPE")["formula"][0]
print(f"YIELD_CURVE_SLOPE is declared as: {declared_formula}")

agreement = macro.select(
    (pl.col("t10y2y") - (pl.col("dgs10") - pl.col("dgs2"))).abs().alias("gap_to_recomputed"),
    (pl.col("t10y2y") - pl.col("YIELD_CURVE_SLOPE")).abs().alias("gap_to_derived_column"),
).drop_nulls()
print(
    f"Largest gap between FRED's spread and 10Y minus 2Y: {agreement['gap_to_recomputed'].max():.2e}"
)
print(
    f"Largest gap between FRED's spread and the derived column: {agreement['gap_to_derived_column'].max():.2e}"
)

# %% [markdown]
# The gaps printed above are the check: a difference at the limit of floating-point precision
# means the two columns are the same quantity and either may be used. Where they disagree, the
# recomputation from `dgs10` and `dgs2` is the one to trust, because it is the one whose inputs
# are in the panel and can be inspected.

# %%
spread = macro.select("timestamp", "t10y2y").drop_nulls()
inverted_days = spread.filter(pl.col("t10y2y") < 0).height
print(f"Days in the full history with an inverted curve: {inverted_days:,} of {len(spread):,}")
print(f"Share of the history inverted: {inverted_days / len(spread):.1%}")

# %%
spread_recent = spread.filter(pl.col("timestamp") >= pl.lit(RECENT_START).str.to_date())
spread_pd = spread_recent.to_pandas()
inverted = spread_pd[spread_pd["t10y2y"] < 0]

fig = go.Figure()
fig.add_trace(
    go.Scatter(
        x=spread_pd["timestamp"],
        y=spread_pd["t10y2y"],
        mode="lines",
        name="10-year minus 2-year",
        line=dict(color=COLORS["blue"], width=1.5),
    )
)
if len(inverted) > 0:
    fig.add_trace(
        go.Scatter(
            x=inverted["timestamp"],
            y=inverted["t10y2y"],
            mode="none",
            fill="tozeroy",
            fillcolor="rgba(200, 117, 51, 0.3)",  # translucent COLORS["copper"]
            name="Inverted",
        )
    )
fig.add_hline(y=0, line_color=COLORS["negative"], line_width=2)
fig.update_layout(
    title="Ten-year minus two-year spread, with inversions shaded",
    xaxis_title="Date",
    yaxis_title="Spread (percentage points)",
    height=400,
    legend=dict(orientation="h", yanchor="bottom", y=1.02, xanchor="center", x=0.5),
)
show_plotly_with_alt(
    fig,
    "Line chart of the ten-year minus two-year Treasury spread over the recent window, in "
    "percentage points, with a zero line and the region below it shaded.",
)

# %% [markdown]
# ## 6. Mixed frequencies, and why the row counts do not show them
#
# Counting non-null rows is the obvious way to ask how often a series is published, and on this
# panel it gives the wrong answer for every series. The monthly unemployment rate has a value on
# every one of the panel's calendar days, and so does quarterly GDP: the file was built by
# carrying each series' last released value forward onto the daily grid, so the nulls that would
# have revealed the cadence are already gone.
#
# What the fill leaves intact is how often the value *changes*. A monthly series carried forward
# holds one value for a month at a time whatever grid it sits on, so counting the changes
# recovers the release clock. It recovers a lower bound on it, strictly: two consecutive releases
# that print the same number look like one, which matters for a coarsely rounded series and not
# for a price.

# %%
cadence = pl.DataFrame(
    {
        "series": [c for c in macro.columns if c != "timestamp"],
        "rows_with_a_value": [
            int(macro[c].is_not_null().sum()) for c in macro.columns if c != "timestamp"
        ],
        "value_changes": [
            int((macro[c] != macro[c].shift(1)).sum()) for c in macro.columns if c != "timestamp"
        ],
    }
).join(meta.select(pl.col("series"), "native_frequency", "description"), on="series", how="left")

years = (last_date - first_date).days / 365.25
cadence = cadence.with_columns(changes_per_year=(pl.col("value_changes") / years).round(1)).sort(
    "changes_per_year", descending=True
)
cadence.select("series", "description", "native_frequency", "rows_with_a_value", "changes_per_year")

# %%
fig = px.bar(
    cadence.drop_nulls("native_frequency").to_pandas(),
    x="changes_per_year",
    y="series",
    color="native_frequency",
    orientation="h",
    hover_name="description",
    title="How often each series changes value per year, by publication frequency",
    labels={
        "changes_per_year": "Times the value changes per year (a lower bound on releases)",
        "series": "",
        "native_frequency": "Published",
    },
    log_x=True,
)
fig.update_layout(
    height=620,
    yaxis=dict(categoryorder="total ascending"),
    margin=dict(l=150),  # `YIELD_CURVE_SLOPE` and `YIELD_CURVE_5_10` clip against the default
)
show_plotly_with_alt(
    fig,
    "Horizontal bar chart, on a logarithmic axis, of how often each series in the panel changes "
    "value per year, one bar per series, coloured by the publication frequency recorded in the "
    "FRED metadata.",
)

# %% [markdown]
# The bars recover each series' publication frequency from the panel alone, without being told
# it: the colour is the frequency the FRED metadata records, and it is not an input to the count.
# A row count over the same panel makes every series look daily.
#
# The unemployment rate is the case where the lower bound bites, and it is worth seeing rather
# than taking on trust. It is published monthly and rounded to a tenth of a percentage point, so
# across a year of releases the printed value repeats often enough that the change count comes in
# under the release count. The cell below counts both for one year.
#
# ### Why forward fill, and what it costs
#
# The test a fill has to pass is not which method it uses; it is which observations the value on
# a date was computed from. Carrying the last released value forward passes because it reads
# only what was already out. So does any trailing calculation on released values - an average of
# the last three releases, an exponentially weighted mean, a forecast fitted on history alone.
#
# What fails is anything that reaches forward. Interpolating between two monthly readings puts a
# value on the tenth of the month computed partly from the reading published on the thirtieth.
# A backward fill does it outright. A centred moving average takes half its window from the
# future, and a seasonal adjustment estimated over the whole sample takes its factors from
# every year in it, including the ones after the date being adjusted.
#
# What forward fill costs is that the panel says nothing about *when* the value it carries became
# known. The unemployment rate for March is published in early April, so a row dated 15 March
# carrying March's rate is showing a number nobody had. That gap is a release lag, and closing it
# is the subject of [`07_macro_data_alignment`](07_macro_data_alignment.ipynb).

# %%
unrate_2024 = macro.select("timestamp", "unrate").filter(pl.col("timestamp").dt.year() == 2024)
by_month = (
    unrate_2024.group_by(pl.col("timestamp").dt.month().alias("month"))
    .agg(
        pl.col("timestamp").min().alias("first_day"),
        pl.col("unrate").n_unique().alias("distinct_values_in_month"),
        pl.col("unrate").first().alias("rate"),
    )
    .sort("month")
)
changes = int((unrate_2024["unrate"] != unrate_2024["unrate"].shift(1)).sum())
print(f"Rows in 2024: {len(unrate_2024)}")
print(f"Months, and so releases, in 2024: {len(by_month)}")
print(f"Days on which the printed rate changed: {changes}")
by_month

# %% [markdown]
# ## 7. Three series together
#
# Each of the three charts above is drawn from one market in isolation. Putting them on a shared
# date axis is what lets the same stretch of time be read across all three at once, which is the
# construction the rest of the book uses whenever a rates move, a curve move and a volatility
# move have to be attributed to the same event rather than to three coincidences.

# %%
recent = macro.filter(pl.col("timestamp") >= pl.lit(RECENT_START).str.to_date()).to_pandas()

fig = make_subplots(
    rows=3,
    cols=1,
    shared_xaxes=True,
    subplot_titles=(
        "Treasury yields",
        "Curve spread, 10-year minus 2-year",
        "VIX",
    ),
    vertical_spacing=0.08,
)
fig.add_trace(
    go.Scatter(
        x=recent["timestamp"],
        y=recent["dgs2"],
        mode="lines",
        name="2-year",
        line=dict(color=COLORS["copper"]),
    ),
    row=1,
    col=1,
)
fig.add_trace(
    go.Scatter(
        x=recent["timestamp"],
        y=recent["dgs10"],
        mode="lines",
        name="10-year",
        line=dict(color=COLORS["blue"]),
    ),
    row=1,
    col=1,
)
fig.add_trace(
    go.Scatter(
        x=recent["timestamp"],
        y=recent["t10y2y"],
        mode="lines",
        name="10-year minus 2-year",
        line=dict(color=COLORS["blue"]),
        fill="tozeroy",
        fillcolor="rgba(26, 45, 74, 0.12)",  # translucent COLORS["slate"]
    ),
    row=2,
    col=1,
)
fig.add_hline(y=0, line_dash="dash", line_color=COLORS["negative"], row=2, col=1)
fig.add_trace(
    go.Scatter(
        x=recent["timestamp"],
        y=recent["vixcls"],
        mode="lines",
        name="VIX",
        line=dict(color=COLORS["amber"]),
        fill="tozeroy",
        fillcolor="rgba(212, 168, 75, 0.15)",  # translucent COLORS["amber"]
    ),
    row=3,
    col=1,
)
fig.add_hline(y=20, line_dash="dash", line_color=COLORS["neutral"], row=3, col=1)
fig.update_yaxes(title_text="% per year", row=1, col=1)
fig.update_yaxes(title_text="Percentage points", row=2, col=1)
fig.update_yaxes(title_text="Index", row=3, col=1)
fig.update_layout(
    height=650,
    title_text="Yields, curve spread and volatility on one time axis",
    legend=dict(orientation="h", yanchor="bottom", y=1.06, xanchor="center", x=0.5),
    # The legend sits above the plotting area, between the figure title and the first subplot
    # title, and the three crowd each other at the default top margin.
    margin=dict(t=130),
)
show_plotly_with_alt(
    fig,
    "Three stacked panels sharing one date axis over the recent window: the two- and ten-year "
    "Treasury yields in percent per year, the ten-year minus two-year spread in percentage "
    "points with a dashed zero line, and the VIX in annualized percent volatility with a dashed "
    "rule at the lower band level.",
)

# %% [markdown]
# ## Key Takeaways
#
# 1. Establish what one row of a panel means before computing anything from it. This one is on a
#    calendar-day grid, weekends included, which is not the grid any of its sources publishes on.
# 2. A row count does not tell you how often a series is published once the panel has been
#    forward-filled. Counting how often the value changes recovers a lower bound on each source's
#    release clock, which is enough to sort daily from weekly from monthly, and is short of the
#    true count wherever consecutive releases print the same rounded number.
# 3. What makes a fill safe is that the value on a date was computed only from observations
#    already released by that date. Forward fill qualifies, and so does any trailing average or
#    causal forecast. Interpolation, backward fill, a centred window and a whole-sample seasonal
#    adjustment all reach forward, and none of them will announce that they did.
# 4. Forward fill still leaves the release lag unhandled: the value it carries on a given date is
#    often one the market had not yet been told. That is a separate correction and it is where
#    the next notebook starts.
# 5. Where a panel carries a quantity twice, once as published and once as derived, check the
#    derived column against the formula its metadata declares rather than trusting the name.
#
# ## Optional: keeping the panel current
#
# The shipped parquet is a snapshot and is sufficient for every notebook in this book. For a
# live pipeline, `ml4t-data` wraps the FRED API: `MacroDataManager` downloads and reloads the
# Treasury curve and derives the curve slope and a regime label from it, and `FREDProvider`
# fetches any series by its FRED identifier. Both need a free API key from
# [fred.stlouisfed.org](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/docs/api/api_key.html).
#
# ```python
# from ml4t.data.macro import MacroDataManager
# from ml4t.data.providers.fred import FREDProvider
#
# manager = MacroDataManager()
# manager.download_treasury_yields()   # fetch the curve
# manager.get_yield_curve_slope()      # 10-year minus 2-year
# manager.get_regime()                 # the regime label derived from the slope
#
# provider = FREDProvider()
# provider.fetch_ohlcv("UMCSENT", start="2020-01-01")   # consumer sentiment
# ```

```