PCE, GDP and so on. It’s like a big old alphabet soup when it comes to economic data.
And while I don’t think you need to be an economist to do well in trading, you do need to stay on top of the scheduled news.
So here are my tips for doing so systematically and easily.
1. Pick Your Poison: Choose Your Calendar
There are lots of free online calendars that share great information. It was actually one of my past coaching students who traded futures who introduced me to ForexFactory.com.
Now, don’t let the name sideline you. Even though it’s called Forex Factory, it is a great tool to know what’s coming up on any given day or week, even if you trade other assets.
When you go to the calendar page, you’ll see the current week’s lineup, and you can always jump ahead. From there, there are a few adjustments I recommend making to get the most out of it.
2. Filter for Impact
Once you’ve picked your calendar, I want you to filter for the information for impact.
On the current Forex Factory interface, click the green filter icon in the top right. Under Expected Impact, you’ll see red and orange folders indicating high- and medium-impact information. Those are the only ones I normally keep tabs on.
Under Event Types, I select all.
And because I’m mostly focusing on ES futures and stocks, I select only USD under currencies. You’ll see there are other choices for the major currencies depending on what you trade.
Once you’ve set up your filters and hit Apply, you should see something like this on the main calendar screen:
But in my opinion, it’s not enough to just glance at this.
Here’s how you really bring it home.
3. Get Your Hands on It
When we look at information, whether it’s digital or printed on paper, our eyes are taking it in.
But when we “touch” the information by using our hands with it, I find we become even more aware of it.
For example, look at the jobs data coming up Friday in this calendar. You can literally copy and paste that entire gray section from the Forex Factory site into a Word document, a notepad, your trading journal or whatever you use, and then document what that information looks like and really feel it.
Average Hourly Earnings month over month has a forecast of 0.3%, and the previous reading was 0.3%. That’s good to know because it’s expected to stay steady.
Then Non-Farm Employment Change has a forecast of 90K, compared with the previous 162K. From there, if you want to research further, you can start asking questions like: What does that mean about the labor market? How does that tie into the current Fed stance?
The point is that you’ve actually spent a little time with the information before the release happens.
A Couple of Extra Things I Do
I already include this information in Skinny on the Mini® report, which is part of my ES Futures Outlook service. So if you happen to get that service, you don’t have to do this stuff on your own.
But there are two extra things I personally do that I include in my reports.
First, when I know there might be other important market-moving information that’s not necessarily under the red or orange folder categories, I’ll go back into Forex Factory and review the yellow-filtered folder options too. That can make the calendar feel very large, so I don’t necessarily keep those turned on all the time, but sometimes it’s good to know what else is out there because there can be other potentially market-moving events, like Fed speak, especially in this hawkish environment.
Second, I’ve started training my AI (Claude in this case) to search beyond just the Forex Factory calendar for additional events and news that may fuel market movement on a particular day, especially earnings by S&P 500 companies. I dial this into ES futures trading but an LLM like Claude can be trained to do this for any particular market or asset class. It’s gotten pretty helpful lately so I now also include that in my reports when relevant.
I think this has helped me be more ready for potential turns based on releases of economic data and investors reacting to them.
So I hope this helps you stay on top of the data and boost your trading, especially during wild market times!
👉 Trader Check-In
I shared some of the economic data I keep tabs on above, so I’m curious:
What’s ONE economic report or scheduled market event you pay the most attention to in your trading?
Comment below, I’d love to hear it.
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