Research preview

India’s consumer price index is expected to jump to 5.65 % in September, up from 4.82 % a month earlier. The acceleration signals stronger demand pressures and potential monetary tightening, creating a fresh set of signals for quantitative strategies that rely on macro‑driven factor models. This article shows how to incorporate such inflation surprises into high‑dimensional regressions, regularised estimators, and modern debiased machine‑learning pipelines used by systematic traders. Inflation as a High‑Dimensional Predictor Retail inflation is only one entry in a long list of macro variables that can be fed into a trading model: industrial production, import‑export balances, commodity prices, and market‑based expectations (e.g., CPI futures)....