Economic Calendars are essential for knowing when the market may experience high volatility and key figures are announced that can move prices quickly. You can use this economic calendar to filter economic events by country, date and importance. We have also produced a guide on the most important economic indicators for traders.
Trading Platform Economic Calendars
These brokers all offer their own version of economic calendars and in some cases link their order tickets directly into it for fast execution. Once you are logged into their platforms you can also see what price action has historically and typically occurred after figures have been announced.
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The economic calendar can be a very powerful tool for traders and an indispensable aid memoir for investors. But which is the best economic calendar and what differentiates the contenders?
Forex Factory
Forex Factory is a site dedicated to the FX markets and Forex trading. It’s aimed squarely at experienced and full-time FX traders. The site’s mission statement is that it links traders to the market and to each other.
The calendar layout might look simplistic and even a bit old-fashioned. However, don’t be deceived because it’s an advanced tool with built-in search and filtering functionality.
You can search for releases by date, currency, impact and event type. But you also search using keywords such as the name of a fed official. The expected impact of events is colour-coded with red being the highest and grey the lowest.
The detail folder icon contains a pop-up description of the data, a release history and an explanation about why the release matters to traders and investors.
Investing.com
One of the best-known websites in trading Investing.com is full of tools, charts news, data, and adverts.
As such the site sometimes looks crowded or even chaotic and the calendar can almost get lost among all the other content.
However, despite that, it is quite a capable offering, with tabs for releases falling due today, tomorrow, this week and next week. As well as a forecast for what to expect, alongside details of the previous release, where relevant or available.
There are also tabs for those trading stocks, with details about upcoming including earnings, dividends and splits, as well as IPOs.
Users can filter the calendar by country, event type and expected impact, and there is also an expiration calendar for those trading on-exchange futures and options.
Trading Economics
Trading Economics is a stalwart of the trading and investing scene, particularly for those whose strategy is driven by macroeconomic data, which is the site’s speciality.
The economic calendar (which is the one I tend to use most) is clearly laid out, and very comprehensive.
There are our filters at the top of the page that allow you to select time frames, data impact, country of origin and category of release. You can also adjust the calendar clock to the timezone of your choice.
Sign up for a free account and login and you can set alerts on releases that matter to you, or, for other market events like new high or low points in commodity or FX prices.
Click on an item in the calendar and you will be taken to a dedicated page for the data point. That contains a chart, a brief commentary, as well a release history and a list of related data points.
Subscribers to the site can also download data via an Excel add-in or a dedicated API.
Marketwatch.com
Marketwatch is in the same stable as Barons and the Wall Street Journal. To get the most from this service you really need to be a subscriber.
However, the economic calendar is still offered free of charge, be aware though that it’s focused entirely on US macroeconomic releases.
The calendar is rather simplistic and lacks the functionality of its peers.
However, one feature that sets it apart from the competition, is a list of the prior week’s releases and events.
Many of which contain a link to a dedicated article about that item. This is a great way for traders and investors to catch up with events they may have missed or been unaware of.
Daily FX
Daily FX has been around since 2002, these days the site is owned by margin trading giants IG Group and it provides a wide variety of data and analysis across FX, equity crypto and commodity markets.
Among the various tools on the site is an economic calendar which is not dissimilar to Forex Factories offering.
I say that because the calendar can be filtered or sorted by the date of release, the country of origin, or event impact, and there is also a keyword search facility.
Event impact is colour-coded and is clearly visible in the calendar, which is presented in a bold and easily readable script, and contains forecasts and details of prior data, for each upcoming release.
When a release hits the market the Daily FX calendar highlights how the data compares to expectations with a colour-coded up or down arrow.
Alongside the economic calendar, the site contains an earnings calendar for stock traders as well as a calendar solely dedicated to central bank events and releases.
Newsquawk
Newssquawk is an alternative to visual calendars and comes in the shape of Squawk boxes service that provides traders and investors with a spoken commentary about macroeconomic releases and other events throughout the trading day.
One of the most popular of these is provided by Newsquawk which offers channels dedicated to equities, energy, fixed-income forex and metals Subscriptions to their services start at £174.00 per month but there is a 7-day free trial so you that you kick the tyres as it were.
As with many things in trading the answer to the question “Which is the best economic calendar” will likely come down to a personal preference about which calendar you find the easiest to read and navigate around, and which contains information that you find interesting and actionable.
