The economic calendar in forex is one of the tools of traders in helping them decide to trade in a currency.
Especially for traders based on fundamental analysis, they will always to monitoring the schedule every day.
This because very important to read the economic calendar schedule. Especially on news releases marked with high-impact news. This event often makes a high volatility market.
What the economic calendar looks like, let us learn all about the case. Don’t miss it.
Work from home with TenkoFX broker on forex, crypto and CFD
TenkoFX broker regulated by IFSC BelizeOpen an account or try Demo account.
What is the forex economic calendar?
An economic calendar is an information displayed as a sequence of calendar lists containing economic news releases. This is used by traders and investors to monitor events that have the potential to cause changes in financial markets.
An economic calendar is usually displayed in tabular form per specific date where each day contains several market-moving events in chronological order.
The potential impact of each event is also displayed in the list, making it easier for traders and investors to anticipate the possible consequences of these events.
For beginners, traders who are less experienced may still lack an understanding of the economic calendar and its relation to financial markets.
However, as a trader or investor, the announcement of some economic data and policies listed can spontaneously have a very large impact.
Some examples of the impact are increasing or decreasing the exchange rate of a country’s currency, increasing or decreasing stock prices, and so on.
What data in the economic calendar?
Information in the Economic Calendar is more familiarly called economic indicators. This is statistical data that shows certain information about economic news in a country or region in a certain period.
Economic indicators in list economic news that usually released by government agencies, international organizations, or private research institutes.
For example, every quarter the United States Government releases Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data.
This information allows investors to analyze the performance of the US economy over the previous three months. And compare the figures with last year’s performance.
Better economic performance in GDP can have a significant impact on investment decisions made by market participants.
In list also releases news about meetings and monetary policy announcements from central banks. Especially central banks of developed countries.
The central bank always holds meetings several times a year. The goal is to discuss current economic conditions and determine monetary policy.
One example of monetary policy is an increase or decrease in interest rates.
How does the economic calendar work?
The economic calendar is a routine schedule of news related to the economy in a country. Where the news information becomes an economic indicator in analyzing changes in the forex currency.
Economic news released mainly on major currencies GBP, USD, JPY, AUD, CAD, EUR, and others.
The economic list usually forms as the metric table that contains the date of the month and year during which the economic news releases of a particular country will be included in the list.
For example, today 22 February 2021 there will be a news release for Germany about the Ifo Business Climate which will be released at 16.00. Germany is one of the European countries so traders who choose currency Euro they need to pay attention on time this news will be released.
Below example economic calendar by Dailyfx.com
Dailyfx
Economic data that will be released usually have “forecast” and “previous” available information.
The forecast is a prediction that might be a number that will come out in a news release. And the previous is the previous actual data that will be used as a comparison with the actual data that will be released after the time and date arrive.
After the economic data till on time, the news will be updated with the latest data, and it is called actual data. Usually, traders will evaluate the actual data with previous data. If there is a wide difference it will allow them to make a decision to buy or sell the currency.
This is one reason the causes price movements after the news to be very volatile.
How important is the economic calendar?
It’s important to always monitor market changes caused by changes in economic conditions in a country where you are trading the currency.
Often high impact news seen by millions of traders around the world is the reason for increased volatility due to higher than usual trading volume.
By always following economic news updates through the economic calendar. Hence traders can estimate the amount of risk they will take.
Especially traders who are based on technical analysis, usually they will close pending orders or positions when high-impact news releases are released to avoid high risks.
Scalping trader need attention to the economic calendar
Scalping is a short-term strategy, they prefer price movements whose ups and downs are not too significant to avoid overtrades. Meanwhile, high-impact news often causes prices to move so fast and cannot be analyzed with indicators.
Avoiding trading during high-impact news is a safe way of scalping to maintain a trading account. Therefore, always reading the news is very important for them.
How to read the economic calendar?
If you visit economic calendar pages for example at Forexfactory, Investing, etc. There are 3 guidelines to take into account when the news is bad or good for the currency.
Bad news usually affects the currency, but sometimes good news doesn’t get a response from market players, it’s more the psychology of traders in modern analysis.
The numbers contained in one metric line of the economic calendar are also a consideration for traders to conclude the effect of the news on the currency.
The three important guidelines are “actual”, “forecast” and “previous”.
Actual
Actual is the latest information after the news is release. It is a number that may be in percent, or in decimal, which is the current value of a news item.
Depending on the type of news released. Higher values are usually considered to be a good indicator of a currency.
The actual data is not filled in if a news item is still on the list but has not reached the point when the news is released. So traders must pay attention to what time the news will be released, to get actual data.
Forecast
One news metric that will be released also includes forecast data. This is the prediction of financial analysts by comparing several economic reports on the market. If the forecast and actual values are the same or only slightly different, it is usually good for the currency.
Previous
Previous is past data, which reflects the condition of a news item in the previous period. Usually, if there is a high range of differences it can trigger currency price movements to be higher. However, if there are no big differences, traders usually prefer to wait and this causes the market to move as usual.
How to read economic calendar investing.com
The image above is the economic calendar page from Investing.com. There are filters to make it easier for you to go to and select the list of news, Yesterday, Today, This week, and next week.
These are useful filters, to make it easier for you to select today’s or yesterday’s, or next week’s lists.
If you want to see a list of today’s news, just a simple step with a click “today” on top of the table. Then you will be directed to today’s news.
Next below is the Current time information, which provides the latest time information. Then on top of the table, there is box information, which provides information on the Time, Currency, Impact, event, actual, forecast, and previous.
- Time, if time schedule the news will release.
- Currency is a box metric that provides currency information.
- Impact, Investing flags the impact column with a choice of three stars. A good review will get three stars, meaning it high impacts news.
- The event, this column for news name in calendar economy.
- Actual, this is information real data after news has been released.
- The forecast is a value prediction from an analyst.
- Previous, data or information actual data but on past time.
To get detailed news, simply click on the news event. Hence information will appear in a new tab in your browser.
How to read economic calendar Forexfactory.com
The Forexfactory economic calendar is on the home page, of the site forecfactory.com. It’s under the Scanner currency pair box.
The Forexfactory economic calendar display in a simpler view. But you can also explore news by clicking the button “more.” The button is located at the bottom left of the economic calendar box.
The information presented is more or less the same as the features on Investing. The only thing that distinguishes it is the signs for impact, which are color, red for high impact, green for medium impact, and yellow for low impact.
To get detailed news information, click “Open Detail” which is a folder symbol between the impact and actual rows.
Ahead of the news release, usually for the actual column. There will be an available refresh button to update the data if the news has been released. You can click its button to get an update instead refresh the page.
How to read economic calendar FXstreet
The FXstreet economic calendar display is quite compact with several filters. You can using filter to select searching preferences. This makes it quite easy to have an impact filter feature that can be adjusted for high, medium, and low, this will simplify news search results.
If you don’t want to show all the news, just choose a high-impact filter and all high-impact news will appear. You can also select filters by country and category.
To read the details of the news, just click on the highlighted news and the news description will appear.
For high, low, and medium impact news types, FXstreet uses color bars. Low impact news is yellow with only a third of the bars filled with color. The medium-impact is green with two-thirds of the bars filled with color. And high impact with red and the entire bar filled with color.
You can also read the history of related news information by following the dashboard link shown by the graph on the rightmost row of news metrics.
Economic calendar Babypips
Babypips is a very popular forex education site, many traders learn for free on this site. You can also find economic calendar information at Babypips.
Babypips’ economic calendar page interface looks cleaner with an elegant layout. The date and day navigation buttons are very accessible. This makes it easy for you to select the day and date with one click.
There is a GMT adjustment feature so you can choose your location to adjust the time to your local time.
For search filters, you have several options, currency, impact, and session market. To read the news description you can click on the marked graph and hour on the right of the metric. But the drawback is that some news stories may not have descriptions available.
Economic calendar South Africa
South Africa, which is a country with a growing forex industry, can access the popular economic calendar outlined above.
However, some brokers who provide a South Africa economic calendar include Thinkmarket and FXCM. You can also find economic calendar information on za.investing.com and Trading economics.
Economic calendar app
The economic calendar is very useful for forex traders. But what if he’s on the go and can’t read the list of news on his laptop?
The solution is to install an economic calendar application on your smartphone. You won’t missing the chances with high-impact news that can impact your trading.
There are several applications, FXstreet for iPhone, forex admiral market calendar for iPhone, there is even an application for android but it is not verified by google play store.
But the most popular economic calendar application is Tradays. This application is available for android as well as the IoS which can be downloaded on the app store and google play store.
Tradays Feature
Tradays has a feature that traders can use, to view the economic calendar schedule you can easily navigate to the desired date. Apart from that, there are also filters for high, low, and medium news and country filters.
One useful feature is that you can schedule alerts for reminders before news releases with a choice of settings, on time, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and 60 minutes.
What’s even cooler is the interface features that support multiple languages. Using the Tradays application on your smartphone you can also practice trading with a demo account.
Economic calendar app windows
To install an economic calendar on a Windows PC, the way you can do this is by installing an Android emulator on your computer.BlueStacks.com or BigNox.com. This might overload your computer because emulator software requires a large bandwidth.
If you already success install the emulator then login google account and install it through the google play store.
Economic calendar analysis
After understanding the importance of the economic calendar, you must also understand how to analyze the economic calendar. Following are some steps for using the economic calendar in trading.
- Open an economic calendar that you can use, for example, Forexfactory.
- See today’s date for each of these economic calendars, and match it with your local time. Time mistakes can mess up your trading. Might you can use timeanddate.com to convert your local time.
- Find high-impact news, this is because more often it has an impact on currencies, low impact is more neglected.
- Compare the High Impact news on different economic calendars, for example, Forexfactory, Babypips, and DailyFX. If the forecast value is different, then avoid trading on the news. But if the forecast value is the same or more or less you can select this news.
- Read the Actual, Forecast, and Previous columns. Also check, whether there is other news at the same hour (or near) for the currency and whether the forecast results are contradicting each other.
- If all the checklist indicators above are valid, then wait announcement the news.
- After the news release, please refresh the economic calendar on each site to bring up the actual values and compare.
- Compare the results of the Actual vs Forecast vs Previous results. If the Actual value is out of the Forecast and Previous value, you may continue to start trading on the news.
- If the actual results are better than the forecast and the previous, then usually the currency value will strengthen, and vice versa, weaken.
- You can use the actual data reference to open orders, but it must be with risk management.
Important note
Why is risk management important? Because the response of market participants to news may be different, which causes market psychology to move according to demand and supply, which reflects the actions of accumulation of market participants.
Which is the most accurate calendar?
Once you have experience using the economic calendar for trading. You will find a variety of market conditions and the impact of news on the market.
And as a reminder that using an economic calendar is no guarantee of making a profit. Because the forex market is a large pool consisting of various kinds of large and small fish that can cause the waves to change direction.
Of the several economic calendar sites that provide real-time data is Forexfactory, this site is a favorite of traders who use the economic calendar as a trading tool.
Final thought
How to use the economic calendar aims to make a profit from forex trading. However, from some experiences, market players do not always respond to the news.
Or it could happen before the news release but the movement is already very active. And usually, after the release time, the movement is normal even contrary to the actual results of news.
In that case, remember that hedge funds that have large funds may have stolen a start because they get news leaks early.
Ready to start trading forex, crypto? Open account or try Demo account.
Read more article
Swing trading strategy forex, crypto
