You commonly hear us analyze every move on the charts but just as important are the news events that can cause those moves. In today’s environment of Fiscal Cliffs and Central Bank intervention, you never want to be without the knowledge of the next Central Bank meeting or major news announcement.
This article will introduce you to the DailyFX Economic Calendar so you know what to expect and we’ll walk through customizing the calendar so you’re only focusing on the news that is important to you.
Here is what the Economic Calendar looks like:
In default mode, the Calendar will show you ever piece of economic news coming out for the major economies. For many of you that will be information overload so you’ll want to customize the look.
Here is how you can customize the Economic Calendar. First, I’d recommend you change the time frame to what you’re most comfortable with. For most of you, it will be Eastern Standard Time. Next, click the Filter button to look at the events that are of importance to you. This will be determined by country and importance.
For example, if you’re trading EURUSD, you’ll want to focus on news coming out of the Eurozone and United States that is of high importance. Your Filter would look like this
Once you select ‘Apply Filter’, you should only see Eurozone and United States news announcements that have a high propensity to move the market should the news surprise traders and institutions.
A few other helpful points on using the Economic Calendar is that you are informed on what most news announcements cover as well as the date of every Central Bank announcement.
If you’re not familiar with the Eurozone Event of the German ZEW Survey, you can click the notes icon and get a breakdown on what is covered:
To access the Central Bank Calendar, locate this icon on the top of the calendar and click:
Below is the Central Bank Calendar for 2012. It will be updated at the beginning of the New Year so that you know when every meeting is well ahead of time.
We will also prepare articles before major rate decisions so you know the possible set-ups given market expectations. We recently put an article together before the Reserve Bank of Australia’s rate announcement in early November.
Another benefit of coming to DailyFX for your Forex market news and analysis is that we’ll often walk through High-Importance events live with you through our Live Trading Room.
You can access this by clicking from the menu options:
If you want an overview of the most important events for the upcoming week, we recommend you watch Jeremy Wagner’s US Opening Bell every Monday morning at 9:30am EST. Jeremy breaks down the biggest events in the week ahead that have the potential to move the market.
DailyFX will provide every news announcement to you so that you can know what’s happening around the globe and how it can potentially affect your trades.
Happy Trading.
---Written by Tyler Yell, Trading Instructor
To contact Tyler, email tyell@fxcm.com.
To be added to Tyler’s e-mail distribution list, please click here.
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