Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis provides significant amount of macro-economic metrics, varying from unemployment rate and mortgage rates to gross corporate profits and much more. FRED is an acronym for "Federal Reserve Economic Data"; their database contains approximately 730,000 metrics. We have integrated 5,000 of the most popular series, which covers 99% of series which have any meaningful popularity.
On TrendSpider, you can have this data displayed as a lower indicator. This way, you can correlate the price action with the series of your interest. Federal Reserve Economic Data is available in the Other Data menu in the top toolbar of the application.
Once added, it looks as a lower indicator. Click on ... button in the Chart Key next to the FRED item in order to edit its properties (like which FRED series to display e.t.c.). Here is the explanation for each of parameters.
Recessions
We do display periods of recession (data from National Bureau of Economic Research) as faded areas on the FRED indicator panel.
Transformation
You can see a FRED series "as it is" (i.e., Unemployment rate) which will look like a conventional straightforward chart: a value of X at a candle Y would mean that At date Y Unemployment Rate was equal to X. This is a default way for browsing this data.
On the other side, if you want to focus on magnitude of changes in a metric (rather than on its absolute values), then you can also apply a "As Change%" transformation. With this transformation, a value of X at a candle Y would mean that At date Y Unemployment Rate has changed by X% (relative to date Y-1).
Aggregate
Some of FRED series are yearly, some are quarterly (i.e., they publish 1 number per quarter), some are weekly or daily. But on TrendSpider, you can browse them on any time frames of charts. I.e., you can browse a FRED series which has 1 value per day on a Monthly chart. In this case, you need 1 data point per month (in order for that to be painted correctly) but you have 23 of them.
In order for that to work well, you should apply a meaningful aggregate. The Aggregate parameter defines the method we use to generate a single data point from multiple data points. I.e., for Aggregate: Last for a case above we'll display "last Daily value of a month" for a corresponding Monthly candle.
Be careful when applying aggregates, as they will always work nice mathematically, but sometimes they simply make no sense in terms of analyzing the data. I.e., there's no reason to apply Aggregate: Sum to series which are naturally percentages (like Unemployment Rate).
Level At
In case if you have a transformation applied, FRED indication will have a red dotted line (which is in zero by default). This level is nothing but a customizable line which you can use to define the "base line" visually. I.e., if you set it to 0, then you can easily tell that everything below the red line means "the core metric declining".