Economic Calendar

[Ashsanders]

Hi

 

does anybody trade using the Economic Calendar and if so how do you do it?

 

thanks

[Mercury]

Trade no, I see no justification for trading off the calendar but perhaps your question is more around so called fundamentals vs technical analysis based trading (see post on this topic elsewhere).  Very often actual news/data releases produce the opposite price action to the intuitive one.  There are various theories for this but one I subscribe to is that the main market movers have already priced in what they think the data will say and often they over do it, hence the counter intuitive movement.  In addition we are in a period where bad news on the economy has been good news for financial markets as marker movers think this leads to more central bank stimulus.  I think we may be reaching the end of the road for this though.

 

The one thing you do need to watch out for is volatility around economic calendar releases and those counter intuitive reversals.  I tend to avoid trading in proximity to major releases such as FOMC, ECB, BoJ and non farms.  Interestingly BoE super Thursday has been a bit of a non event of late a they don't do much but sit on their hands and pontificate.  Also watch out for individual company reporting and dividend declaration if you are using you CFDs for share trading rather than indices.  If you are trading indices you should really be on the spreadbetting platform.