www.ForexFactory.com
Gone are the days when the foreign exchange market, the world’s largest over-the-counter market, is restricted to banks, hedge funds, and other large financial institutions. With trading volume growing even in these volatile times, the pressure is strong for those services that want to meet the needs of the retail forex trader.
ForexFactory.com, a popular financial website focused on providing services to forex traders, has added new features to its website in response to the increasing number of retail forex traders. Forexfactory.com is a community of forex traders. Members of this community can participate in forums, read forex-related market news and commentary, and gain access to the forex calendar. We first reviewed ForexFactory.com back in October 2007, and since then, the forex calendar (Figure 1) has had some new features added to it, which are worth looking at.
Figure 1: forexfactory.com calendar. This is what you will see when you open up the calendar.
The calendar updates almost in real-time and displays a list of all events that could affect the forex markets by date, time, and currency. It also displays the severity of the impact that the news release may have on the forex market through the use of a color-coded “factory” icon. In the case of an economic data release, you will see the actual forecast and previous releases if applicable. You do have the option of filtering the news stories based on certain currencies or based on the severity of the impact.
The “Detail” view is where you will find what is relevant to your trading. For example, when I viewed the detail for the Nzier Business Confidence (Figure 2), an event that was expected to have a high impact, it displayed the “Specs” and “History.”
Figure 2: nzier business confidence survey. Here you see what selecting the Detail view brings up.
The Specs give traders a brief description of what that data measures, its usual effects, how often it is released, its next release, how to apply it, and why a trader should find this information useful.
The History section will display the data for the last two years for this specific data. This gives you some idea of where the current release is with respect to the previous two years. You can also see links to other news stories that are related to this news release.
Registration is free. But you can easily navigate around the site and see what is offered. If you think the information will be useful to you, by all means register on the site.
—Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan, Editor