HOW NEWS MOVES PM PRICES
Plain English
News doesn't just move prices — it moves probabilities. A single tweet, jobs report, or court ruling can re-price a contract by 20+ cents in seconds. Speed and pre-positioning beat reaction.
Going deeper
PM prices respond to information differently than equities: discrete events trigger discrete repricings, with very little decay. A Fed-cut probability can go from 70% to 95% on a single CPI print. To trade news effectively, pre-define your action plan: which contracts you'll touch, what price triggers entry, how you'll size. Real-time news feeds (Bloomberg, Reuters, government RSS) give a few seconds of edge over Twitter. The window of mispricing typically lasts minutes; after that, market makers and arbitrageurs have fully repriced.
Examples
CPI print
August CPI prints 0.2% MoM vs 0.3% expected. Fed-cut contracts jump from $0.55 to $0.78 within 90 seconds. Pre-positioned traders captured the move; reactive ones got the worst fills.
Election court ruling
A surprise court ruling shifts an election outcome. The relevant PM contract moves 35 cents in 5 minutes. Speed of information = speed of edge capture.