If you are a Forex trader that would like to trade Forex currency news, there’s one thing you can’t miss: the Forex Factory economic calendar.
Forex Factory has one of the best economic calendars and here’s why:
- The layout is easy to understand
- The update is quick when important news events are released
Why Forex Traders Need Economic Calendars
These are the 4 main reasons why Forex traders need economic calendars:
- Forex news traders need to know know what kind of fundamental news is coming out that has a great chance of impacting the Forex market and they want to capitalize (make profit) on the resultant market move that happens when the news is released.
- Some traders are not Forex news traders and they need the Forex calendar for a different reason: to avoid trading during news release times and dates because the price move during news times is so volatile that they just don’t want to be in a trade when the news is about to be released. Only after the news is released and the market settles down then they start looking for trading setups to trade.
- Some Forex traders need to Forex calendar to move their stop loss closer to lock in a lot more profits when they know that a major news is about to be released because they know, the market can go either way, up or down and this can work against their current running trade and eat up whatever profits that they have accumulated so far.
- Some Forex traders simply want to see what time and date the Forex news is going to be released and as that time is being approached, they exit all their trades. Why? They may have made sufficient profits and don’t like the chance that the news might make the market go the other way and eat up their trading profits.
- Longer term traders who use swing trading strategies, probably won’t worry too much about the daily news events like a day trader would.
11 Forex Factory Calendar Features That You Should Know
Here are the list of 11 Forex Factory calendar features that you should know about that are shown on this image:
Now I will go through each one of the calendar features numbered as shown above.
Forex Factory Calendar Feature#1: Time
I always set my time on Forex Factoryy website to my local time zone because the time you see there is not your local time zone.
This makes it easier (for my head) not to calculate by converting the timezone there to my local time.
Makes sense?
As mentioned, the time that you see here is not based on a different time so, if you want to, you can change it to match your own local time.
All you need to do is click that link and you will be taken to a page where you can change the time zone settings so that the time in the Forex Factoryy website matches your local time on your computer:
Forex Factory Calendar Feature #2: Navigation Column
On the navigation column, you can see that there are a few things there:
- a full calendar of the current month and clicking any of those those dates for the month will take you to a page where the you can see the schedule of what forex news is going to be released. Or you can also click dates in the past and it also takes you to a page where you can see what news was released on the certain date in the past.
- and then you have a few short cut links like”today, tomorrow, yesterday, Up Next” etc and when you click those, the do the same thing as above.
Forex Factory Calendar Feature #3: Currency Column
This column list the currency pairs that are going to be impacted by the release of forex news. For example, if Australia is going to make an interest rate announcement, any currency pair that is pegged to the Aussie Dollar will be impacted.
Forex Factory Calendar Feature #4: Impact Column
This column simply tells the potential severity of the impact a forex news is going to have on a currency pair. The impacts are color coded into 3 colors:
- Red=Forex news with high impact expected
- Brown=forex news with medium impact expected
- Yellow=forex news with low impact expected
Forex Factory Calendar Feature #5: Name Of News
This column simply lists the all the names of the news that are scheduled to be released.
Forex Factory Calendar Feature #6: Detail Column
In the detail column, you have a yellow folder icon. When you click that icon, a page opens up you can read a lot more detail about the particular news, details like:
- Source of the forex news
- what that forex news measures
- what kind of effect it has on the currency
- past history of the actuals and forecast
- when the next date of release of similar news
Forex Factory Calendar Feature #7: Actual Column
The actual column shows you the actual figures figures that were released during the news. For example, if the Australian unemployment rate released was 5.8 %, then you will see 5.8% there:
Forex Factory Calendar Feature #8: Forecast
Right after the actual column, you have the forecast column. The forecast column shows you what economists were forecasting BEFORE the news was to be released. Whether they were right or not not is determined by the “actual” figure that comes out in the actual column.
Now, both the forecast column and actual columns are really important because many traders react to the differences in the forecast and actual.
Here’s an example: What if the economists were forecasting that the Reserve bank of Australia was going to decrease the the interest from 2.5% to 2 % this month?
So traders would be expecting based on the forecast that that the actual figure would be 2% but what if the news came out and the interest rate remains the same, at 2.5%?
How do you think the traders will react to that? The most likely outcome would be that there will be lots of buying.
Forex Factory Calendar Feature #9: Previous
The previous column simply shows you what the previous “actual” figure was for that particular news.
Forex Factory Calendar Feature #10: Graph
When you go to the graph column and click the graph icon, a page will show up showing you a graph of the actuals vs the forecast figures of the news from the past dates that were released:
Forex Factory Calendar Feature #11: Legend
I should have placed the Forex factory calendar legend in the #1 spot but hey, I got distracted whilst writing this post so that means its going to make the last of the list.
Right, on the legend on Forex Factoryy calendar simply tells you what each of the objects, symbols and colors that you see on the calendar means:
So in the legend, you have:
- High, Medium and Low Impact news are represented by objects looking like a folder top that has been eaten by a caterpillar. You also have a grey color non-economic legend.
- actual pending is a green round circle with a rotating white arrow inside, you see this when it is just a few minutes to seconds from the news being released.
- Related stories symbol looks like an open folder with a white paper sticking out.
- FF Alert Inside looks like a brown folder with a star sticking out of it. You see this when Forex Factoryy want to alert you about something that you may not know about, so its always better to check this FF Alert out by clicking on that icon.
- Green numbers on the calendars represent better than forecast or revised better figures.
- Red numbers mean worse than forecast or revised worse.
There are few others under the legend as you can see which I have mentioned here but are really self explanatory.
They are not really important except for the ones I just mentioned above.
You may also be interested to read about the 8 Amazing Facts About Forex Factory that Not Many Forex Traders Know About.
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