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Our interactive economic calendar, powered by Reuters, details thousands of upcoming global macroeconomic events, with a variety of layout options which can help you understand how each event potentially impacts forex, index, equity and commodity markets.
Switch between five different calendar views or look up historic data for each event to get a better understanding of data trends within a particular country. You can also customise the calendar to suit your personal preferences and view as much or as little data as you want for each market event by choosing how the events are displayed.
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What is an economic calendar?
An economic calendar allows you to plan your trading stategy by learning which events are due for release in the coming days and weeks. You can also get the latest data on the crucial economic announcements, which can potentially impact the financial markets. These include US non-farm payrolls data, interest-rate announcements, inflation numbers, manufacturing figures, GDP and much more.
Powered by Thomson Reuters, our economic calendar provides real-time updates on all the market-moving announcements. We also offer a Reuters news feed for live account holders.
How to use our economic calendar
- Research the markets. Whether you have positions open within one specific sector or a variety of sectors, including forex, commodities and stocks, it is important that you know what is going on within the financial markets.
- Learn about economic indicators. These are macroeconomic events that can be used to analyse the performance of a country, such as GDP reports, CPI and PPI levels, and unemployment rates.
- Compare data. You can compare both current and historical data of over 34 countries and other financial markets with our global view setting.
- Keep up to date with news releases. Trading on news releases and economic announcements is a vital aspect of fundamental analysis, which is just as important as technical analysis and studying price charts.
- Build an event-driven trading strategy. This can help you to take advantage of temporary mispricings and changes in an asset's price.
- Customise your calendar. You can choose how much data you want to see at once and how the data is displayed by creating a live account.
- Set up trading alerts. Once you have created your account, you will have access to our online platform features. These include trading alerts for your mobile phone.
How to read the economic calendar
Calendar view
The forex economic calendar covers close to 4,000 macroeconomic events, also incorporating central bank meetings and important speeches, to offer a complete picture of the world’s important economic announcements. These include the closely-watched US non-farm payrolls release, CPI and PPI data, plus manufacturing figures from major economies including the US, UK, eurozone, China and Japan. You can also obtain at-a-glance information on major announcements for economies such as India and New Zealand.
The customisable nature of the calendar allows you to sort events by date, country, timeframe, category or its likely impact on the market. Each event is categorised into high, medium and low impact levels, based on five years’ worth of back-testing and historical price data. These distinctions help you to determine which announcements are likely to have the most impact on the financial markets.
You are also able to drill down into a specific country and access charts for data such as interest rates and GDP, and compare these with the same data from other countries.
Ultimately, you can set up the calendar to suit your preferences and trading strategy – you could choose to view only the events that are relevant to a specific instrument (EUR/USD or UK 100), or by the particular asset class (forex, indices, shares, commodities or treasuries) that you wish to trade.
Global view
The global view lets you compare major economic indicators for 34 countries, including interest rates, gross domestic product (GDP), inflation rates, unemployment levels and consumer confidence data.
Compare
Graphically compare different event results country to country, by choosing from the dropdown menu or selecting the tick boxes below the charts. Comparing charts helps to identify key trends for individual countries, or to help compare data between countries. You can also use the ‘source’ button to access articles associated with individual economic events for further information.
Dashboard
The dashboard pulls together a series of informative tables to help broaden your economic knowledge, offering a broad and comparative global view. Look up GDP, unemployment or interest rates worldwide, or find out about data such as corporate tax rates and foreign investment.
Current
This useful feature helps you access the latest results for the major economic events, separated by sector, so you know you always have the latest information for those announcements which are more likely to impact the instruments you’re looking to trade.
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Disclaimer: CMC Markets is an execution-only service provider. The material (whether or not it states any opinions) is for general information purposes only, and does not take into account your personal circ*mstances or objectives. Nothing in this material is (or should be considered to be) financial, investment or other advice on which reliance should be placed. No opinion given in the material constitutes a recommendation by CMC Markets or the author that any particular investment, security, transaction or investment strategy is suitable for any specific person. The material has not been prepared in accordance with legal requirements designed to promote the independence of investment research. Although we are not specifically prevented from dealing before providing this material, we do not seek to take advantage of the material prior to its dissemination.
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