Keep track of time when trading around news announcements

Timing I am sure everyone is aware how crucial timing is. In the foreign currency or FOREX market it becomes even more important. If you haven’t already read my article on The best trading times in the 24 hour Forex market I would advise you to take a look.Depending on your trading style it is also important to know the timing of news announcements and the currency’s they will likely effect. The two best free resources I have found for economic based news announcements are:

Forex Factory Calendar- This is one of the best free calendars around, previous result and forecast result are shown as well as a link to the page were the news announcement will be posted. The Forex Factory Calendar also allows you to alter the time zone settings to display what time a news announcement will occur in your region which is handy if you don’t have a program like ZoneTick. Forex Factory Calendar also allows you to setup email alerts for news events.

Bloomberg Economic Calendar- This is a very US centric calendar, market focus is highlighted for the current day at the top of the calendar. The Bloomberg calendar also has a very intuitive slider base interface for navigating day and date of interest. Boomberg calendar also goes into a bit more detail about each event and for the bigger events a consensus is provided. It should be noted that Bloomberg licenses the calendar data from Econoday.

Some of the bigger news announcements can tend to move the market anywhere from 20 to 100 pips. If you are a new trader I would definitely stay clear of trading around these times. I use ZoneTick to keep track of these news events, with the release of the new version including countdown timers and stopwatches.

My ZoneTick Setup

At the moment I am monitoring three time zones in the task bar Tokyo, London and New York. When a market is open the clock has a green background and when a market is closed the clock has a purple background. Alarms can also be set for each clock. This can be seen in the screen shot below:

In the screen shot above you will also notice the three countdown timers. These are new to ZoneTick version 4 and are very configurable. At the moment I am monitoring the AUD/USD So I have setup my countdown timers to countdown to these events. The real beauty of ZoneTick is that I can enter an event in the countdown timer and I can use any world wide time zone I wish without having to manually convert to my local time zone.

Unemployment Claims announcement will be occurring later this week. This announcement occurs at 8:30 AM New York time so I simply enter this in my location field. Then I set the countdown timer to automatically open the web page when the announcement is released. In addition to this you can add alarms to sound at a given time before the event and change the colour of the countdown timer for the last five minutes before news is released.

Taking it to the next level

This is a good start however I am working on a program that will download the latest announcement, use text mining and artificial intelligence and then recommend a buy or sell signal for the given currency(this is a long way off). I am very happy with ZoneTick for the moment and I would recommend to any currency trader.

You can download it and try it for 30 days: Download ZoneTick.

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You can read more about ZoneTick on their web site.

About the author

Mark - Is a 28 year old form Australia. He has a Bachelor in Economics and a Major in CS. He is currently working towards his CFP. His interests include algorithmic trading systems, artificial intelligence, game theory and poker.