Economic Calendar

What Is the Economic Calendar?

The economic calendar refers to the scheduled dates of significant releases or events that may affect the movement of individual security prices or markets as a whole. Investors and traders use the economic calendar to plan trades and portfolio reallocations and to be alert for chart patterns and indicators that may be caused or affected by these events. The economic calendar for various countries is available for free on many financial and market websites.

Understanding the Economic Calendar

Economic calendars usually focus on a given country's scheduled releases of economic reports. Examples of events on an economic calendar include weekly jobless claims, reports of new home starts, scheduled changes in the interest rate or interest rate signaling, regular reports from the Federal Reserve or other central banks, and economic sentiment surveys from specific markets and many others.

Traders and investors rely on the economic calendar to provide information and trading opportunities. Traders often move into or out of positions corresponding with an announcement of some event or with the heavy trading volume that often precedes a scheduled announcement.

Following the economic calendar can be especially beneficial for a trader who wants to take a short position. If the trader guesses correctly about the nature of the announcement, they can open a position immediately before the scheduled announcement and then close it within hours.

Navigating the Economic Calendar

Economic calendars are available for free from financial and economic websites. These calendars vary from site to site, however. Although they are referred to as "economic calendars," the actual calendar listings depend on the website's focus and the events the users of the website are likely to be interested in.

For example, the economic calendar on many websites lists only events in the United States as these events have a large market impact. Other sites allow users to build their own economic calendar by using filters to display or hide events.

While these free calendars can be a helpful starting point, most traders customize a calendar of their own based on the types of trades they prefer and the asset classes and regions they are comfortable with. Moreover, a customized economic calendar doesn't need to be limited to government and central bank releases.

A trader may, for example, create an economic calendar around the major releases from oil-producing regions while also incorporating the U.S. Energy Information Administration's weekly petroleum status report and the quarterly filing dates of the oil sector companies they follow. In this way, an economic calendar becomes a customizable trading tool like an indicator alert.