Reading an economic calendar and filtering what matters

An economic calendar lists dozens of events a day. Most should change nothing for you. This is how
to filter down to the few that genuinely move markets.

1. Three columns to read, not one

Each row carries three numbers:

• Forecast — what analysts expect. This is what the market has already priced.
• Actual — the published figure.
• Previous — last time’s figure, and crucially whether it was revised.

Markets do not react to the actual figure. They react to the gap between actual and
forecast. A strong growth number can still send a currency down if it came in below
expectation.

2. Events worth attention, by impact

Top tier

• Central bank rate decisions, and the press conference after.
• CPI — consumer prices, the
  inflation gauge.
• NFP — US non-farm
  payrolls, the first Friday of the month.

Middle tier

• GDP,
  PMI, retail sales,
  weekly jobless claims.

Usually ignorable

• Second-tier data, regional surveys, sentiment indices from small institutions.

3. Filter by the currencies you trade

If you only run EUR/USD, news about the Mexican peso is irrelevant. Set the calendar filter to
USD and EUR, high impact, and the daily list shrinks to two or three lines.

4. The detail most often missed: revisions

With NFP and GDP, the previous month’s figure is regularly restated. A “good” report alongside a
sharp downward revision is bad news. The market reads both; beginners read only the new number and are
surprised when price goes the other way.

5. What to do around a release

• 15–30 minutes before — liquidity thins, spreads widen. Open nothing new.
• At the release — spreads can widen several times over, slippage is heavy, and a
  stop loss can fill well away from its level.
• 15–30 minutes after — the first reaction is often partly reversed and liquidity
  returns. A safer moment to act.

6. If you are holding through it

Two reasonable options: close part of the position beforehand, or accept the slippage risk and
reduce size from the outset. What is not reasonable is holding a large position and trusting
the stop loss to fill where you put it — in a spread blowout it usually does not.

7. A two-minute habit

Each morning, open the calendar, filter to your currencies, and put the high-impact times in your
own diary. That alone avoids most of the pointless losses that come from “I didn’t know there was news
today”.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Conditions and fee levels are published by the brokers and can change at any time — check with the broker you actually use. Leveraged forex and CFD trading carries a high level of risk and can cost you your entire deposit.