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FRED Data: The Free Gold Mine Every Investor Should Know About

By Annie

I'm going to tell you about one of the most underrated resources in all of finance. It's free. It's maintained by the US government. It has over 800,000 economic and financial time series. And almost nobody outside of professional economists and data nerds knows it exists.

It's called FRED. Short for Federal Reserve Economic Data. And if you care about markets, the economy, or making decisions based on actual data instead of vibes, you should know about it.

What is FRED?

FRED is a database maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It aggregates economic data from dozens of sources — the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the Treasury, the Fed itself, international organizations, and more — and makes it all available in one place with a clean, consistent interface.

Want to see US unemployment going back to 1948? FRED has it. Want to compare GDP growth across countries? FRED has it. Want a time series of the average price of eggs in the Midwest? Yeah, FRED probably has that too.

The breadth is absurd. We're talking:

  • Labor market data (unemployment, job openings, wages, labor force participation)
  • Inflation metrics (CPI, PCE, PPI — core, headline, by category)
  • GDP and national accounts (personal consumption, business investment, government spending)
  • Interest rates (Treasury yields, mortgage rates, Fed Funds, swap rates)
  • Money supply and credit (M1, M2, commercial bank assets, consumer credit)
  • Housing (home sales, prices, starts, permits)
  • Trade (imports, exports, trade balance)
  • International data (exchange rates, foreign GDP, inflation)
  • And hundreds of thousands more series I haven't even thought of

All of it free. All of it public. All of it updated regularly by the agencies that produce the data.

Why isn't everyone using this?

Great question. A few reasons:

1. Nobody tells you it exists. FRED doesn't advertise. It doesn't have a marketing team. It's just... there, quietly doing its thing. If you don't stumble across it, you'd never know.

2. The interface is... functional. FRED's web interface works, but it's designed by and for economists who care more about data accuracy than user experience. It's not bad, it's just not going to win any design awards.

3. The learning curve is real. With 800,000+ series, finding the right one can be tricky. There are multiple measures of inflation, multiple measures of unemployment, multiple ways to slice almost any economic concept. If you don't know what you're looking for, you can get lost fast.

4. The data is raw. FRED gives you the numbers, but it doesn't interpret them for you. You need to know what "core PCE" means, why "non-farm payrolls" is different from "household survey employment," and what "seasonally adjusted annual rate" implies. It assumes you know what you're doing.

Why it's a gold mine anyway

Despite the learning curve, FRED is the authoritative source for US economic data. Bloomberg, Reuters, Wall Street banks, hedge funds, research firms — they all pull from the same sources FRED aggregates. The difference is they charge you $20,000/year for the privilege.

FRED is free. And it's not a compromised free version. It's the same data the pros use.

If you can figure out how to navigate it — or better yet, use the FRED API to pull data programmatically — you have access to the same macro datasets as a Goldman Sachs research analyst. You can backtest strategies, build economic models, fact-check news headlines, or just satisfy your curiosity about whether housing really is as expensive as it feels (spoiler: yes).

What we do with FRED at kibble.shop

At kibble.shop, FRED is one of our core data sources. We pull key economic series from FRED — things like:

  • The yield curve (Treasury yields across maturities)
  • Unemployment rate and job market indicators
  • Inflation (CPI, core CPI, PCE)
  • GDP growth and components
  • Consumer spending and retail sales
  • Housing market data (sales, starts, prices)
  • Interest rate history (Fed Funds, mortgage rates)
  • Money supply and credit metrics
  • Trade balance and import/export data

We clean it up, normalize it, add context, and make it easy to query — whether you're a human who wants a chart or an AI agent that needs a CSV.

The goal: take the best parts of FRED (the data) and remove the friction (the learning curve, the interface, the need to remember series IDs like "DGS10" and "UNRATE").

How to use FRED yourself

If you want to dive into FRED directly, here's the quickest path:

1. Start at fred.stlouisfed.org. That's the homepage.

2. Use the search bar. Type something like "unemployment rate" or "inflation" and you'll get a list of series. Click one and you'll see a chart.

3. Download the data. Every series page has a download button. You can grab it as CSV, Excel, or JSON. For free. Forever.

4. Learn the series IDs. Pros memorize shortcuts like UNRATE (unemployment), DGS10 (10-year Treasury), CPIAUCSL (Consumer Price Index). Once you know the codes, you can pull data lightning-fast.

5. Use the API if you code. FRED has a free API (requires a key, but it's instant and free). You can pull any series programmatically with a few lines of Python. This is how we integrate FRED data into kibble.shop.

The catch

There's only one real catch with FRED: it's US-centric. Most of the data is about the US economy. They have some international data, but it's not comprehensive. If you need deep data on, say, emerging markets or European macro, you'll need other sources.

But for US economic and financial data, FRED is unbeatable.

A few of my favorite FRED series

If you're new to FRED, here are some series worth bookmarking:

  • UNRATE — US unemployment rate (headline number everyone watches)
  • DGS10 — 10-year Treasury yield (the benchmark for "risk-free" rates)
  • T10Y2Y — 10-year minus 2-year Treasury spread (the yield curve inversion indicator)
  • CPIAUCSL — Consumer Price Index (the main inflation gauge)
  • FEDFUNDS — Federal Funds effective rate (what the Fed actually controls)
  • MORTGAGE30US — 30-year mortgage rate (impacts every homebuyer and homeowner)
  • PAYEMS — Non-farm payrolls (the monthly jobs number that moves markets)
  • DEXUSEU — US/Euro exchange rate
  • VIXCLS — The VIX (market volatility / fear gauge)

Seriously, just type those codes into FRED and you'll have charts going back decades.

The bottom line

FRED is one of those rare government projects that just... works. It's not flashy. It's not marketed. But it's an absolute treasure trove of high-quality, free, public data.

If you've ever felt like you don't have access to the same information as "the pros," FRED is proof that's not true. The data is out there. You just need to know where to look.

And if you want that data cleaned up, contextualized, and served in a way that doesn't require memorizing series codes, that's what we're building at kibble.shop. FRED is the engine. We're trying to build a better interface.

Explore FRED-sourced economic data at kibble.shop — we track key indicators like the yield curve, unemployment, inflation, and more. All free, all updated daily.