Forex Weekly Economic Calendars

Forex weekly economic calendars can be found on various sites, but what are they used for?

Well, these economic calendars are useful in the following scenarios in forex trading:

1. When trading major economic announcements. Some forex trading systems trade announcements that are major, and have been shown to move the market in a big way in the past, and so are likely to do so in the future. There are some forex systems that pull in a high (>80%) reliable win-loss ratio and good profits, simply by trading these announcements .See below for more information.

2. When trading forex systems where you need to exit a trade prior to a major announcement that may affect the currency pair you’re trading, to prevent you from being whipped up or down for the period after the announcement, and thus possibly causing you to be stopped out.

3. For fundamental analysis, which are taken into account by some systems. Many systems don't use fundamental analysis at all, but nevertheless still trade the announcements based on the price movements that occur following the announcement.

Getting The Forex Calendars

You can get a forex weekly economic calendar in a very useful format from:

dailyfx.com

Go to the “Calendar” tab, then click on “Global Economic Calendar For Week Of…” on the left, to get the calendar for the current week with the major announcements bolded. They are listed in GMT and EST (US time).

You can even download the file in excel format (still bolded), then add a column for you own local time by using excel to add the number of hours ahead of GMT that you’re in, to the GMT column, to get a column with your local time. This comes in handy.

Also:

forexnews.com

This site also has a calendar of worldwide announcements on the home page, though the major ones are not bolded.

Together with your economic calendar, also check out forex resources to find out where to get useful forex tools, including world clocks for your computer desktop, in order to know when these announcements are in your local time!

Using The Forex Calendars

Note that an announcement will generally move the market if the economic figures announced are different to the value that was expected, rather than falling on or around the expected figure. Because most systems that trade announcements trade the price action that occurs after the announcement is made (rather than before the spike in price action), you don’t need to know what the economic values are. You just need to watch the price action that happens after the announcement, and apply the system's rules.

You’d want to take note of which announcements are the major ones, which on the dailyfx site are bolded, and also which country the announcement comes from.

The announcements from a certain country will generally affect currency pairs that have that currency in it more than it will affect other currencies, if at all. Thus a major USD announcement, such as the “nonfarm payrolls”, may affect the EURUSD or GBPUSD for example. The way you trade the announcements of course will depend on the forex system that you have chosen. For example, you’ll usually find that they trade after the price actions which occur during the announcement, in a precise way, all based on technical analysis after the announcement, even though the announcement itself is a fundamental event.

This is a great example of mechanical trading reaping good rewards after a fundamental event that results in currency movements.

Note that the strategy for trading announcements with a straddling strategy is available only with certain brokers. The straddle strategy is to place a stop entry both long and short prior to an announcement, as a “one cancels other” order. This is attempted so that if the price explodes upwards then you’d get into a long trade, or if it plummets down, gets you into a short trade, and hence a tidy profit in literally a couple of minutes.

The worse case scenario is that you're taking in and stopped out on both trades, and thus have 2 losing trades one after the other. Many forex brokers have disallowed this kind of trade now, though many still permit this.

Thus the trading strategies that trade announcements do not use this strategy, but use different strategies that are just as effective.