How to journal and review your trades on CPI days

CPI days change how markets behave. Here is how to prepare, record what you did and review it with your own trade history.

Not financial advice. This page is educational information about how to prepare and review trades around scheduled events. It does not tell you what to buy or sell, it does not predict any market move, and trading leveraged products can lose more than you expect. Dates and times come from the official sources linked on the page and can change, so confirm them before you rely on them.

The US Consumer Price Index, usually just called CPI, is one of the scheduled releases that traders of currency pairs, gold and indices circle on the calendar. It does not tell you what price will do. What it does reliably is change how the market behaves for a few minutes: spreads can widen, quotes can jump and stop orders can fill at a worse price than planned. This guide is about the part you control, which is how you prepare for it, how you record what you did and how you review it afterwards using your own trade history.

What CPI is, from the source

CPI is published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). It measures the change over time in prices paid by urban consumers for a basket of goods and services. You will see two headline numbers in most coverage: the overall figure, and the core figure, which leaves out food and energy. Both are reported as a change from the previous month and from a year earlier. The BLS publishes the schedule on its own site, and at the time of writing it lists the release for October 2026 data on 10 November 2026 and for November 2026 data on 10 December 2026, both at 8:30 a.m. BLS publishes in US Eastern time, but confirm the time zone on the BLS schedule before you convert it.

BLS release schedule for the Consumer Price Index. Because governments can reschedule releases, always re-read the schedule in the week you trade.

Why traders watch it

Inflation data feeds into expectations about central bank interest rates, and rate expectations affect currencies, gold and equity indices. That is why a CPI release is often followed by quick moves in the US dollar pairs. Whether the move goes up or down depends on how the number compares with what the market expected, and that is not knowable in advance. This site does not forecast it and neither should a journal. What a journal can show is how you trade around it.

Three ways traders handle a release day

Approach	What it means	What to record
Stand aside	No new trades and often no open trades from a few minutes before to a while after the release.	Whether you really stayed out, and what you did with open trades.
Trade the reaction	Wait for the first volatility to settle, then trade what price does.	How long you waited, your spread and your size.
Hold through	Keep a position open across the release with a planned stop.	The planned stop, the fill and the result.

None of these is recommended here. They are listed so you can name what you actually did, because a journal can only compare approaches that are labelled.

Tag every trade near CPI

The first step is to be able to find those trades later. In the journal, give each trade you took close to the release a tag such as news: CPI, and add a second tag for what you did: flat before, held through, entered after or faded the spike. Tags cost ten seconds and are the only way to compare news trades with ordinary ones afterwards. The tagging guide shows a simple scheme.

What to write in the notes

Whether the trade was planned before the release or taken in reaction to it.
Your size compared with a normal trade. Many traders find they trade bigger or smaller on event days without deciding to.
The spread you saw when you entered. MetaTrader 5 history does not store the spread at the time of a trade, so a note or a screenshot is the only record.
How you felt. A sentence is enough: calm, rushed, afraid to miss it.

Check slippage with the data you already have

AI Trading Journal records each closed position's stop loss and its exit price, and it keeps the last non-zero stop it found on the position's orders. For a trade that ended on its stop, the gap between the two numbers is a rough measure of slippage. If your stop was at 1.0850 and the exit price was 1.0842, the stop filled eight pips worse than planned. This only works when the stop was not moved after entry, so check the notes. For how stops show in history, see history comments sl, tp and so and stops level and freeze level.

Find the release in your broker's clock

MetaTrader 5 stamps deals in the broker's server time, and a journal built from that history shows the same clock. To find the trades around a release you have to turn the official time, usually given in Eastern, London or Tokyo time, into server time. The page on MT5 server time explains how to find your broker's offset, and the session times converter does the arithmetic. Check the conversion in the weeks when the United States and Europe change their clocks on different dates, because the usual gap between New York and London briefly changes.

A worked example (hypothetical)

A trader reviews six months of trades. Eight were taken within thirty minutes of a CPI release. Three won and five lost. The wins averaged +$90 and the losses averaged -$70. Their other 140 trades had a win rate of 45%, an average win of +$60 and an average loss of -$50. On the CPI trades the total is 3 x 90 - 5 x 70 = -$80. On the other trades it is 63 x 60 - 77 x 50 = -$70. Neither is large, and eight trades is far too few to conclude anything. What the exercise shows is how the review works: tag, group, compare, and then keep collecting. After a year the numbers might tell a clearer story. The expectancy calculator and average win and loss calculator turn each group into one figure.

Before the release: a short checklist

Check the official release time and convert it to your broker's server time.
Decide in writing whether you will trade, wait or stay out, and what your maximum risk is.
Use a size you would be comfortable losing on a worse fill than planned. A position size calculator helps.
Remember that a stop is a trigger, not a promised price.
Close or reduce what you do not want to hold, if that is your plan.

After the release: what to look at

Did you follow the plan you wrote? If not, what changed in the moment?
How did your result compare with an ordinary trade of the same size?
Was there slippage on a stop, and how large?
Did a loss on this event lead to a revenge trade later the same day? See the revenge trading journal.

See your CPI days in the calendar

AI Trading Journal reads your closed trades from MetaTrader 5 and shows each day as a coloured tile in the P&L calendar, with the result and the trade count. If you mark release dates in your own notes, the calendar makes it easy to see whether those days stand out. The app runs on your Windows PC, keeps the journal on your computer, and does not place or change trades. It does not know what CPI is or when it is released, so the dates come from you and from the official schedule.

Limits

This page does not predict how any market will react to a release.
Release dates and times are taken from the BLS schedule at the time of writing and can change.
A journal reading closed history cannot show the spread at the time of a trade or the path of a stop, only its final recorded level.
Nothing here is trading or investment advice.

Related: how to journal GDP and PCE days, since PCE is another inflation measure.

Weekly and survey releases get a lighter routine: retail sales and jobless claims.

Frequently asked questions

What time is the US CPI release?

The BLS lists it at 8:30 a.m., and it publishes in US Eastern time. Check the BLS schedule for the exact date and confirm the time zone before converting.

When is the next CPI release?

At the time of writing the BLS schedule lists 10 November 2026 for October data and 10 December 2026 for November data. Always check the schedule.

Should I trade during the CPI release?

That is your decision. This page does not recommend it. It shows how to record what you do so you can review it.

How do I find my CPI trades in the journal?

Tag them when you take them, then filter by the tag. The journal does not know release dates, so the tag comes from you.

How can I measure slippage?

For a trade that ended on its stop, compare the stop level with the exit price. The gap is a rough measure, if the stop was not moved.

Related guides

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