Methodology

Each figure on this site is taken directly from a named public source, and every calculator shows you the exact formula it used to get there. This page is the single reference for all of it: who publishes each number, how often we refresh it, what we work out ourselves, and what these tools genuinely cannot see.

The reasoning is simple. A calculator that hands you a number and hides the arithmetic is asking for trust it has not earned. If you can see the formula and click through to the agency that published the input, you do not have to take our word for anything.

Where every figure comes from

Economicium uses government and public-domain data almost exclusively. Every source below is licence-checked to permit public redistribution with attribution.

This product uses the FRED® API but is not endorsed or certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Most of these are yours to take. Everything we are permitted to redistribute is downloadable as CSV or JSON from the data downloads page, with no key and no signup. The two exceptions, and the reason for each, are listed there.

Baked, not fetched

None of these tools call an outside service while you are using them. The data is fetched ahead of time, checked, and built into the page. What loads is a cached snapshot carrying the date it was taken. That keeps pages fast, and it keeps them working when a provider has an outage, which is why every figure here should be read as "as of" rather than "right now." Anything that moves faster than our refresh cycle, live quotes above all, is not something this site tries to give you.

What we compute ourselves

Most figures are passed through unchanged from the agency that published them. A few are ours, and those deserve to be labelled clearly:

• Earnings dates are estimates. We derive a likely reporting window from each company's own historical filing cadence at SEC EDGAR. They are not confirmed dates from the company or from a data vendor, and the real date can land days either side.
• The national debt counter is extrapolated. Treasury publishes an official figure each business day. The ticking number on the page projects forward from the last official figure at the recent average rate of increase, so it is an illustration between publications, not a live feed.
• The Bitcoin halving countdown assumes ten-minute blocks. Real block times vary, so the date drifts.
• Staking yields are computed from each protocol's issuance formula applied to live on-chain totals, rather than read from a staking-data vendor. They move with real network conditions.
• Calendar impact tiers are editorial. Which releases we mark as high-impact is our judgement, not an official designation from anyone.
• The recession "signals active" count is an editorial tally of well-known indicators against conventional thresholds. The underlying series are FRED's. The decision about what counts as a signal is ours.

What these tools cannot see

Every data tool has a blind spot, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to mislead you. Ours:

• No live prices. Nothing here is a real-time quote. If you need tick data, use your broker.
• No consensus forecasts. The economic calendar shows scheduled releases and prior readings, never an expected number. Consensus figures are compiled by commercial vendors whose licences do not permit republishing them for free, so rather than show you a number we cannot source properly, we leave the column out. An empty column is more honest than a borrowed one.
• Inflation figures are national averages. CPI describes a statistical basket, not your basket. Your own rate depends on what you actually buy, which is the whole reason the personal inflation tracker exists.
• Revisions happen. Statistical agencies revise. A figure that was correct when we baked it can be superseded before our next refresh.

Sources we deliberately do not use

Many finance sites are built on the free tiers of market-data vendors. We are not, and the reason is licensing rather than cost. Those free tiers almost always forbid public display or redistribution, so a site that puts them on a public page is usually in breach of the terms it agreed to. We would rather ship fewer numbers than numbers we have no right to show you. That constraint shapes the whole site: if a tool does not exist here, the likeliest explanation is that we could not source it from public data on terms that let us publish it.

The calculators run on your device

Position sizing, net worth, retirement, budgeting and the trading journal all run inside your browser. What you type is not sent to us, because there is nothing on our side to receive it. The one exception is optional Google sign-in, which syncs your trading journal across devices and does nothing at all unless you switch it on yourself. Because your data lives in your browser rather than our database, we cannot recover it for you, so export anything you would be upset to lose.

How AI is used here, and how it is checked

Joey van Diest uses AI assistance for drafting and research. Nothing is published on that basis alone. Every figure, formula and data source is checked against the original publication by a person before it goes live, and no source is cited here that has not been opened and read. Saying so plainly seems better than the alternative, which is letting you assume one thing while another is true.

Corrections

If a number here disagrees with the source it cites, that is a bug and we want to know. Email [email protected] with the page and what looks wrong. Corrections to a published figure are made on the page itself, and the "last updated" date moves when they are.

Everything here is general information, not financial advice. See the full disclaimer, and the author page for who is accountable for it.