Economic Calendar

The free Economic Calendar that comes with the trading software provides a weekly listing of all upcoming economic reports that might affect the foreign exchange market. The reports include the following information:

Local Date: Date and local time report will be released. The example above shows a series of reports and economic statistics to be released from June 11, 2002 until June 14th.

Country: The country issuing report. From top to bottom, the reporting countries shown on the third column above are Japan, Germany, Canada, UK, and the United States.

Name: Event/report name. The first event on the list above is the Monetary Policy Meeting in Japan, followed by the Trade Balance and Current Account Balance figures from Germany.

Period: The period of time covered in the report/statistic. The June 12th Retail Sales reports for the U.S. covers the month of May.

Forecast: Market consensus estimate for each indicator/statistic. The forecast for the Canadian Domestic Motor Vehicle Sales report due out on June 13th, 2002 is an increase of 2.1%.

Actual: Refers to the actual reported figures that were released. The UK Industrial Production figures released on June 11th were up 1.1%.

Previous: Represents the reported results during the prior period for each economic indicator. The UK housing start figures for the previous quarter were up 1.5%.

Whereas not all reports affect the prices of currencies in the same way, currency traders that trade using fundamental analysis will be able to interpret the meaning of the reported figures from one organized section of the trading platform.