The ticker is only the beginning. Here is what comes next.
You finally find a stock you like.
Then you open the options chain.
Which expiration? Which strikes? What entry price? How much is at risk?
Suddenly, finding the stock feels like the easy part.
Matt, the trader behind Income Blueprint, knows that bottleneck.
He describes going through 40 or 50 stocks, sometimes finding one he liked only to discover the options didn’t fit.
That’s the problem he built the tool to help solve.
Income Blueprint ranks stocks with a five-part scorecard, then evaluates the options for pricing, liquidity, and potential return.
It surfaces three top-ranked stock signals, with the available approaches for each.
Open a setup and you can review the proposed options, entry price, expiration, and estimated risk and reward together.
Now you have something concrete to evaluate before deciding whether to trade.
Matt walks through the process in a free presentation.
He also explains how to get 30 days of tool access and options training at no cost, with no credit card required.
One CPI Number Will Decide Whether the Fed Hikes in December
The October CPI report hits at 8:30 a.m. ET this morning, and it arrives with a structural wrinkle that makes it harder to read than any inflation release in recent memory. Because the BLS did not publish an October 2025 CPI news release because of the 2025 lapse in appropriations, it will not publish 12-month percent changes for October 2026 for indexes where October 2025 data are not available. That removes the headline anchor traders normally use to anchor their first reaction.
What is left is the monthly reading, and that number carries an enormous amount of weight today. This is the final publicly released CPI report before the Federal Reserve’s December meeting. Fed funds futures, as tracked by CME FedWatch, currently price roughly an 80% to mid-80% probability of a 25-basis-point hike at the December meeting. That is not an abstract forecast. It is live market positioning sitting directly in front of a data point that could move it sharply in either direction.
What Happened Going In
Consensus forecasts headline CPI at around +0.2% to +0.3% month-over-month and core CPI at +0.2%, down from September’s 0.6% headline and 0.3% core readings, respectively. A smaller boost from gasoline, which eased during October, accounts for much of the expected slowdown in the headline figure. The Cleveland Fed’s inflation nowcast, updated Monday, placed headline at 0.24% and core at 0.21%, which would represent a genuinely soft outcome by recent standards.
That backdrop follows a labor market that rattled the Fed’s patience last week. Nonfarm payrolls increased by 165,000 in October, well above the consensus forecast of about 59,000, while the unemployment rate edged lower to 4.1%. After that jobs data, the rates market leaned further toward a December move; going into this morning, the two-year yield sat around 4.56% and the 10-year was in the mid-4% range. The bond market is not positioned for good news.
Why Core Is the Only Number That Matters
With no official 12-month figures for October 2026 in many key aggregates, the monthly core number is likely to drive the market reaction. Here is why that matters so concretely: a core reading of 0.2% lands in line and effectively holds the December hike probability where it is. The market absorbs it. SPY stabilizes. TLT gets a small bid as yields ease a few basis points.
A core reading of 0.1% changes the conversation entirely. If core CPI holds at 0.2% or lower, the market may perceive that underlying inflationary pressures have eased, potentially reducing expectations for a Fed rate hike in December, and a retreat in Treasury yields would favor a rebound across high-valuation sectors. At 0.1%, those rate-hike odds become vulnerable to a real reset, not a drift.
Run the other direction and the read changes fast. If core CPI reaches 0.3% or higher, especially with prices for both goods and services rising simultaneously, the market may further reinforce rate-hike expectations and push Treasury yields higher, weighing on tech growth stocks. When September’s core came in at 0.3% against a 0.2% forecast, Treasury yields jumped quickly after the release. That is the template for what a hot miss looks like.
How Professionals Are Likely to Approach It
The absence of a clean 12-month comparison creates an interpretive problem that disciplined traders account for before the number drops. Without the usual annual figures, algorithms and human readers alike lose the most common anchor for the initial bid/ask spread. A softer core would be welcome after September’s upside surprise, but it would still leave 2026 looking like a year of limited progress toward 2% inflation and keep the December meeting live. Even a clean 0.2% core does not kill the hike case.
That means the asymmetry today favors restraint over aggression. The market is priced for a hike. A benign number unwinds some of that positioning; it does not crater it. A hot number adds to positioning that is already stretched. That is not a symmetrical risk profile around 8:30.
The Trader’s Lesson
When a data release is stripped of its most familiar comparison metric, the temptation is to fill the void with noise. The first few minutes after 8:30 will see aggressive moves in both SPY and TLT as participants react before they have fully read the tables. The traders who do best in that environment are the ones who know exactly what they are watching before the report drops: in today’s case, the core monthly figure alone. Everything else is distraction. Knowing your single decision variable before the release, not after, is what separates a disciplined process from reactive guesswork.