Data Methodology
Effective date: September 29, 2026
Commodity Man joins dated public data with market-specific summaries. We do not turn every series into one universal price forecast. Source names, observation dates, units, and market dimensions should be checked on the individual page.
Sources and coverage
These are the main source families currently wired into the product. Coverage is not uniform: a source listed here may support only some commodities or signals. If a page shows a different named source, the page-level source label controls.
| Source | Use | Publication cadence | Units and fields |
|---|---|---|---|
| USDA AMS Market News | Physical cash-market reports where integrated, including selected potato and hay series. | Report schedules vary by market; often daily or weekly. | As published for each series, such as $/cwt or $/ton. Grade, region, package, and freight basis matter. |
| USDA NASS QuickStats | Crop and livestock statistics used by selected market-cycle classifiers. | Monthly, seasonal, or annual depending on the table. | The source table’s own unit and reporting period. |
| USDA Foreign Agricultural Service PSD | Production, supply, and distribution balances used by selected crop classifiers. | Updated when USDA publishes revisions or a new reporting cycle. | Commodity-specific quantities and marketing-year balances. |
| U.S. Energy Information Administration | Selected petroleum and natural-gas inventory data. | Primarily weekly publications; release timing is set by EIA. | Examples include million barrels per week and billion cubic feet per week. |
| Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRED | Selected interest-rate and macroeconomic series. | The frequency of each series is set by its publisher. | Varies by series, including rates, indexes, or prices. |
| Financial Modeling Prep | Scheduled economic-calendar events. | Provider data may be revised; retrieval and display can lag the provider. | Event date/time, country, impact, forecast, and prior value where provided. |
| Yahoo Finance | Selected financial-market reference series used by some classifiers. | Publisher and instrument dependent; quotes may be delayed. | Instrument-specific price units. |
Units and comparability
- Cash-price pages retain the unit and market dimensions supplied by the report. Dollars per hundredweight, ton, bushel, head, or package are not interchangeable.
- Region, grade, variety, package, sale type, delivery basis, and report period can change what a price represents. Compare like-for-like series.
- Inventory and balance figures use the source’s reporting period. A weekly change is not a daily measurement; marketing-year balances are not current spot prices.
- Each source may revise observations after publication. Commodity Man can show the revised value after it next ingests it.
Update targets and delays
The shock-detection analysis is scheduled to run every four hours. This is a processing cadence, not a promise that every source refreshes on that schedule or that each run succeeds. Other data updates follow their source-specific publication schedules; Commodity Man may retrieve them later, and provider or application caching can add delay.
Public agencies publish on their own schedules: a weekly report does not become daily data because the site checks more often. Network failures, provider limits, weekends, holidays, and publisher revisions can make the latest available observation older than the latest successful retrieval. This is not a real-time or exchange-direct feed.
“Report date” means the source observation or publication date. “Commodity Man received” or “data refreshed” means when the backend last successfully stored or processed the payload. The two dates answer different questions and can be days or weeks apart.
Market-pressure signals
- Direction is the classifier’s UP, DOWN, or NEUTRAL interpretation of the pressure condition. It is not a forecast of a specific price change.
- Pressure is a market-specific LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH, or N/A category. Crop, livestock, energy, and macro classifiers use different inputs and thresholds; the categories are not a single cross-market statistical scale.
- Pressure score is a normalized 0-to-1 ranking value used to sort supported signals. It is not a probability, confidence percentage, or promise of accuracy.
- For homepage and Markets counts, an active signal means pressure is HIGH or MEDIUM. LOW and N/A are not counted. N/A means the classifier could not produce a usable signal.
Classifiers compare different conditions, including reported inventories, crop or livestock cycle data, and selected financial series. Each signal should be read with its own “why,” source, and date. Commodity Man does not claim 100% accuracy or that a signal will precede a price move.
Corrections and questions
If a value, unit, source label, or interpretation appears wrong, please send the page and series name to hello@commodityman.com. We will check it against the named source.