Forex Economic Calendar

Many factors influence on the Forex market, one of them are economic reports, speeches of politicians, the sentiment index, calculated by the universities, etc. In short we will call it the news.

News vary in degree of importance, the effect on a particular currency, etc. Some traders trade at the time of the news, some rather try to avoid them. In any case, it is important for us to know the time, degree of importance, impact and value of the news.

On many sites there is a section “economic calendar”, but in most cases it is inconvenient to use, or the degree of importance of the events is reflected not quite right. In this review I would like to consider the most competent version of the calendar.

It is located by the link:

http://www.forexfactory.com/calendar.php

Сustomize the calendar

First of all, we need to set the clock, the time of the news coincided with our time zone.

Click on the clock at the top of the page:

Next we see the settings

1) Timezone

Timezone. Select the desire

2) DST ON/OFF

Daylight saving time is ON/OFF

3) Time Format

24 or 12 hour time format.

Next, click Save Settings to save our changes.

Settings are saved even without registering on forexfactory.com

Structure of the calendar

On the calendar page we see the columns:

The economic calendar consists of columns with information easy to understand.

The first column displays the date and day of the week.
In the second column — the news time. In the third - the currency, which is influenced by the news.
Colored icons in the fourth column show the degree of influence on the currency.
The fifth shows a brief description of the news.
The sixth shows a detailed description; to see it you need to click on the icon that resembles a folder.
Next come the values of the news: in the seventh column is the current value (the value that carries the news)
The eighth column shows the predicted value.
The ninth shows the previous record. If the current value is displayed in green, it means that the results of the news has been better than forecast. If it is red, it is worse than the predicted values. Grey color means that the value of the news coincides with the forecast.
In the last column you can see a chart of the previous values over the previous few years.

Also above the calendar there are 2 buttons: “Up Next”, which sends us to the nearby news and the button “Filter”, where you can configure filtering on the currency, the degree of impact and type of the news.

Difference of the news in degree of importance

The column Impact reflects the degree of importance of the news:

Red — strong impact is possible

Orange — the average degree of impact

Yellow — impact is weak or absent

White — not economic events (holidays, etc.)

The current value is displayed in:

Green color — better than forecast

Red — worse than expected

Grey — same as forecast

Let’s come back to the column that reflects the degree of importance of the news. Red color of the icon reports the strong impact on the currency. Orange reports about the average impact. Yellow means weak impact or no impact. Grey color should be mentioned separately, it means non-economic events: various holidays or bank holidays.

If European banks have a rest in the working days, respectively, you should not trade during the European session. You will not see much activity on the market and you will lose time in vain. If America has a day off, you have nothing to do on the market after the closure of Europe. You may ignore Japanese holidays, as they do not cause such a fall in activity on the market.

Impact of the news on currency

Every trader should know that the news impacting the dollar, affect not only the dollar but all currencies, including gold. News on Euro only affects the pair with Euro. You may not pay much attention to the events with other currencies. We ignore all the news in order of importance, except those that are marked in red.

It is better not trade 20 minutes before and 20 minutes after the release of very important news. Do not try to predict the impact of news. It is almost impossible for the ordinary person. Therefore, it is better not to enter the market, and to sit and wait until everything settled down.

Take care, Michael

ForexTraderPortal.com