For central bank announcements (CBA) to exercise autonomous power over financial markets, certain felicity conditions must be met. Their independence and transparency were quickly pinpointed by economists. Other factors have recently been identified by social scientists, such as their educative apparatus and their insertion in the institutional configuration. Based on Peirce’s semiotics, this paper proposes a more systematic view of these felicity conditions: for a sign – e‧g. CBA – to perform in financial markets, it must be followed by market professionals. Peirce’s triadic conceptualization allows us to break down this requirement: the sign must be perceived (as when one says “I follow the news”), understood (“I didn’t follow a word he said”) and obeyed (“I follow the instructions”). This distinction points to strata of social life where the success or failure of these processes of signification is played out: the situation that shares the visible and the invisible, the organization that generates and transmits cognitive resources, and the institution that stabilizes authority. Using this grid, we identify, for the case of CBA, the elements that are well documented in the literature and those that are not. By mobilizing some ethnographic material from a recent survey in a trading room, we then open up some avenues of research related to the situational issue that appears to be under-documented.