Dallas Fed economists produced an alternate measure of their trimmed mean inflation gauge that changes the distribution of prices that get filtered out in a way that is more symmetric. The current version is asymmetric: It trims the top 31% of prices and the bottom 24%. This reflects the average distribution of price changes or "skew" between 1977 and 2009 (over this period the distribution was negatively skewed—the largest monthly outliers were more often steep price declines than steep increases—so cutting deeper into the top tail best matched the headline trend.) The revised version uses the average price data for ten more years (1967-2009) and adjusts the filters accordingly. The result is more symmetric. It drops the bottom 19% and the top 20% of price changes. This 19/20 trimmed mean shows core inflation at 2.6% over the year ended June, up from 2.2% from the 24/31 trimmed mean, but both are below the 3.3% core PCE reading for the same month. "This signals some of the strength in core inflation is likely noise or one-off disturbances unlikely to be repeated, but the medium trend is likely still more elevated than currently suggested by the original trimmed mean." https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2026/0813(Nick Timiraos)