As traders of any market it is important to know what is going on in the world. By this statement I don’t mean you have to sit glued to CNBC or some other brain-dead news service. Every day there are announcements and releases of economic data that have the potential to move markets. Today I thought I would share with you the economic calendars I use and some tools I use for analysis.
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.
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