Each market's calendar

Module 2 taught the discipline of standing near a release. This lesson maps who publishes what, per market - because the calendar is not one calendar.

Energy runs on a weekly clock

Oil's balance updates every Wednesday with the EIA petroleum report, gas every Thursday with the storage number; around them orbit the monthly agency views - the cartel's own, the consuming nations', the US statistical agency's - each re-drawing the full table. Energy analysis is therefore fast-twitch: the stocks-path hypothesis from last lesson gets audited fifty-two times a year, and a view that survives a month of Wednesdays has actually earned something.

Agriculture runs on the growing season

The grain year pivots on a handful of dates: the spring planting intentions, the monthly WASDE re-draws, the quarterly stocks counts that periodically shock everyone, and harvest's ground truth. Between them, in season, the market trades weather forecasts - the one input updated daily that nobody schedules. Agricultural analysis is a long rhythm punctuated by report days that can move a market limit-wide in a minute.

Metals barely have one

Industrial metals publish no weekly balance. Exchange warehouse stocks tick daily but cover a sliver of the world's metal; the authoritative balances come from consultancies, quarterly and paywalled. So metals analysis leans on the macro calendar instead - the rates decisions, the industrial data, the dollar - which is fitting for the asset class this track keeps catching behaving like finance. Gold completes the pattern: its calendar is the central banks', full stop.

• Know your market's cadence before holding through it - module 4's rule, now with the full fixture map.
• Match analytical ambition to audit frequency: a weekly-audited view can be precise; a quarterly-audited one should be structural.
• The unscheduled input - weather, outages, politics - is what the calendar cannot hold. The cadence tells you how long a wrong view can survive undetected, which is itself a risk number.