Introduction

The Economic Calendar is one of the most useful and powerful tools available for Forex investors. As you probably know (and if not that’s OK ! we are here to learn). Currencies rates are influenced by many factors, such as interest rates, inflation, wars, reports, international debts and so on.

Now there are some events that traders can not anticipate, but traders could and should pay attention to global events that probably affect the financial market rates.

Traders can do so by using the economic calendar, simple as it sounds, the economic calendar is a calendar which presents major/minor events and reports by specific date, time, and the influenced currency.

 

How To Use The Economic Calendar

You can find many kinds of economic calendars, most of them work pretty much the same and it’s free to use. For this tutorial, we will use one of the most popular calendars on www.forexfactory.com because it is simple to understand for new traders and it has an explanation for each event. Let’s look at this page from left to right, we added numbers to the specific section in order to make it very clear and simple.

1. Here, we chose a specific day, for example, today – Monday, Jun 4, 2018. It is possible to adjust the time frame by clicking the date

2. In this section (Picture below), we can see the specific time that the announcement will hit the market, for example at 4:30 am (GMT-5) there were two different announcements related to the EUR(Euro) and the GBP(British Pound).

3. In this section, we can see The currency that will be affected by the announcement.

4. I this section, we can see the Impact level – meaning, how strong will this announcement affect the market. There are 3 categories of impact levels sorted by the colors Yellow, Orange, and Red.

1. • Yellow – Low effect, up to 20 pips’ movement on the currency rate.
   • Orange – Medium effect, up to 50 pips’ movement on the currency rate.
   • Red – High effect, up to 100 pips’ movement on the currency rate.

5. The actual announcement, for example at 4:30 am the “Construction PMI”. By clicking the envelope a window will open giving you a full explanation of the announcement, how often it is released to the market, what type of effect in terms of positive or negative influence.

 

6. In this section, we get help with market decisions, on the right-hand-side we have: Previous, Forecast and Actual.

1. 1. Previous – Describes the previous outcome on the market the last time this kind of announcement has been published, some announcements are being published once a week, once a month, once a year. The “Previous” summarizes the effect the last announcement in the specified time frame had on the market.
   2. Forecast – The analyst’s opinion, what Analysts expect will happen to the market.
   3. Actual –  Gives you the outcome, it is published at the same time for all traders around the world. For example, at 4:30 am looking at the “Construction PMI” –  at exactly one second after the clock hits 4:30 am the actual will be displayed. The actual comes in 3 different colors:
      1. 1. • Green – Symbolized a better than expected outcome, meaning the usual effect of the green outcome will be a positive effect on this currency rate (the currency rate will go up).
            • Red – The outcome is worse than expected, which means that effect on the currency will be negative (the currency rate will go down).
            • Black – There wont be a major effect on the currency rate, explained by the small difference between the Actual value and the Foreseen one.

 

 

Are you using an economic calendar? did you found this article useful? do you have any questions?

Stay tuned and share your opinion by Commenting below.