The newsroom reading list
Six primary sources our reporters open every morning, and why each one earns its place ahead of the commentary that surrounds it.
Readers occasionally ask what we read. The honest answer is that most of it is primary documents rather than other journalism, and that the habit of going to the source is the most useful thing a finance reporter can develop. Here is what the desk opens each morning, in rough order.
Central bank releases
Statements, minutes and speeches are published on a fixed schedule, and they are written to be parsed. Reading the full statement rather than a summary catches the changes in wording that matter: a shifted adjective, a dropped sentence, a new qualifier. We keep the previous statement open alongside the new one and compare them line by line. Minutes, published a few weeks later, show the range of views behind the decision, and speeches by individual policymakers show where that range is moving.
Statistical agencies
Inflation, employment, output and trade data come from national statistical offices, and each release includes tables that go far beyond the headline. The tables tell you whether an inflation number was driven by one component or many, whether a jobs figure was revised and by how much, and what the seasonal adjustment did. The summary tells you the headline. We read the tables.
Company filings
Annual and quarterly reports, prospectuses and regulatory filings are long, formulaic and indispensable. The sections most worth the time are the risk factors, the management discussion, the notes to the accounts and, for anything involving a deal, the section on how the price was arrived at. Press releases are written to be read; filings are written to be defensible. The difference is where the information is.
Exchange and clearing house data
Exchanges publish volume, open interest, short-interest and settlement data, most of it free. Clearing houses publish margin requirements. This is the raw material for understanding positioning, and it is more reliable than the surveys that summarise it.
Auction results
Government debt auctions produce a short results sheet: the yield, the bid-to-cover ratio, the share taken by different investor types. Over time these sheets tell you more about demand for government debt than any amount of commentary.
Court and regulatory dockets
Enforcement actions, merger reviews and litigation generate documents that are public and rarely read. A competition authority's statement of objections, or a regulator's final notice, usually contains the facts that the press release summarises in a paragraph.
What is missing
Deliberately absent from the list: social media, most sell-side research and the morning notes that circulate before the open. Each has a use, but each is downstream of the sources above, and reading the source first means the commentary can be judged rather than absorbed.
The reading takes an hour or two each morning. It is the least visible part of the job and the one that most of the rest depends on.