The headline inflation number is a weighted sum of components, and several of the heaviest ones — shelter, used cars, airfares, gasoline — can be estimated ahead of publication from private data that arrives much sooner. You rebuild the index bottom-up from those component estimates and compare your projection against the market's implied distribution before release day. The edge is that shelter alone is a third of the basket and follows rent data with a long, well-documented lag.
Markets on Polymarket where cpi sub-index reconstruction is the natural play:
