Monitoring real-time auto alerts on FRED economic data
Objective
A US-based regional sell side bank wanted to collect and analyze newly released Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) and send email alerts to analysts along with compiled data and visualizations
Challenges
- Large volumes of data that required hourly updating by offshore teams.
- Lack of automation to track new data release.
Approach
- Connected to the FRED API using python to extract and cleanse data into a master database.
- Composed emails using Python and SMTP server with automated data and charts.
- Created an hourly monitoring system to look for new data from multiple FRED datasets and send automatic email alerts with compiled data and charts.
Impact
- Analyzed relevant data points in near real-time, enabling analysts to factor in impact of macroeconomic changes.
- Automated recurring tasks of monitoring, data collection, analysis and reporting for over 15 datasets.
Questions