Economic Calenders

When it comes to economic calendars you will find an assortment of them on-line. There are only two online calendars that I use on daily basis. They are the Forex Calendar @ Forex Factory and Bloomberg Calendar the screenshots of these calendars shown below:

Out of these two calendars my favourite would have to be the Forex Calendar it has more features and has a much easier workflow then Bloomberg. 

Forex Calendar Features

The first thing you will want to do with both these calendars is adjust your time zone. After I have done this I like to get out my trading notebook and I enter  the announcements that will be relevant to me on that given day. To get more detail about a specific announcement simply click on the detail button. The detail window gives you the following information:

• Source
• Measures
• Usual Effect
• Frequency
• Next Release
• FF Notes
• Why Traders care
• Derived via
• Acro Expand
• History
• Related items

The screenshot below shows the Forex Calendar detail feature in action:

The other unique feature the Forex calendar has is the ability to chart historical release data. Like the detail feature you simply click on the chart icon and an interactive chart will be generated within the same window.  The image below shows the chart feature in action:

Software Tools

I use the free tool FF Calendar to news software as it provides an easy way for me to build a database of future and historic news events on my local computer. This is very handy for some system design work I do. The screenshot below shows my news events history database:

Once my database is populated I can then run a script that overlays each of the economic events on the appropriate chart. This allows for me to graphically view the impact if any on the underlying markets. The screenshot below shows the auto generated chart content on the EUR/USD 1 minute spot chart:

In my next post I will talk about the classic reference book that I often refer to surrounding news releases The Secrets of Economic Indicators: Hidden Clues to Future Economic Trends and Investment Opportunities.

• PennyStocking – Part Deux
• ShortStocking
• Tim Raw

So stay tuned 2009 is going to be a big year for global financial markets and a big year for TraineeTrader.

“ASIC will provide a no action letter for hedging of existing positions of market makers arising from their client business. ASIC will settle terms of that letter today, but it will be to the effect that the prohibitions on covered short sales will not apply to hedging a position that was taken by an entity prior to 22 September 2008 as part of its business of dealing as principal in equities, options or derivatives (whether OTC or exchange-traded) to fulfil orders received from clients or to respond to a client’s request to trade, in each case before that date.”

You can read the full details of these recent regulatory changes below:

1. 08-204 Naked short selling not permitted and covered short selling to be disclosed. Friday 19th September 2008.
2. 08-205 Covered short selling not permitted. Sunday 21 September 2008.
3. AD08-20 ASIC advice to ASX market participants regarding hedging existing transactions.Monday 22 September 2008.

With these measures and the US governments Nationalisation of struggling banks and financial institutions there was only one way the market could go today and that was UP. The S&P ASX 200 intraday chart is shown below:

Note: The unusual 11AM Open time.

The other benchmark Australian Index the All Ordinaries index also performed remarkably well to post it’s largest 2 day rally since 1987. The All Ordinaries index intraday chart is shown below:

It will be an interesting week ahead to see how banks and intuitions engineer ways to profit from this temporary regulation.

As you can see the options for PredictorXL are extremely straight forward. It is simply a matter of modifying the options for your desired application and then starting the training process. For the purposes of this review we are going to build a simple model to predict the share price for BHP.AX. This is by no means anywhere near a conclusive model and I am only using it to showcase the power of this software. The first thing I have done is to use BulkQuotesXL to download the closing share price and volume for BHP.AX. Secondly I downloaded the closing prices of the following futures contracts:

• Australian Dollar
• 1-Month Libor
• Aluminium
• Cooper
• Gold
• Silver
• Light Crude Oil

The screen shot below shows the data we will be using for this simple Neural Net model.

After you have collected your data it is simply a matter of clicking New in the NeuroXL predictor dialog box and then clicking learn. You can tweak the options as desired. The lag option allows you to define the number of values you wish to predict. I have found the best results are obtained when lag is set to one. If you click on the show process button you will be able to watch the learning process take place. I should note if you have a large data set and a low Error or % the learning process will take a significant amount of time. Below is a screenshot of NeuroXL Predictor learning about the input output pairs from our data set.

After learning is complete it is simply a matter of clicking on the predict button and choosing a desired cell for the prediction to be placed. The screenshot below shows what the actual value of BHP.AX was and also what our model predicted the value would be.

As you can see this is a fairly good result given such a small data set and the fact that the model was very simple. I look forward to exploring this program in more detail over the coming weeks.