US economic announcements

                                                                           
I must admit that although I pay attention to the economic announcement calendar (which tells you at what time a specific economic statistic is released), I sometimes had trouble grasping whether an announcement was as important as the calendar indicated (many calendars feature icons which indicate whether an announcement is of moderate, high or very high importance). Often times they are not as important as indicated and vice-versa. Another thing that eluded me is how often certain vital economic statistics are released.

In order to make things a bit clearer, I have put together a page (link at the bottom) that illustrates EVERYTHING you need to know about these economic statistic releases. I have focused on the U.S. only for now, as the U.S. economic announcements move the market more than those of other countries (but still, pay attention to big announcements from other territories as well).

To give you an example of how important these release are, take today's Initial Jobless Claims announcement (which comes out every Thursday at 13:30 PM (GMT)). As you can see on the US economic indicator page, this indicator is fairly important (4 stars on a scale of 1 to 5). And if you look at the economic announcement calendar page, it was expected that the market figure would be favourable to the US, and therefore favourable to the US dollar. Having said this, if you look at today's EUR/USD performance on your trading platform (look at the 5 minute chart for the 10th of February), the EUR/USD was on a slow downward slide pretty much all day (if the dollar is expected to rise, than the euro will sink); the market expected good news for the US dollar and this good news was delivered (the actual figure was better than expected, so the EUR/USD remained at its low level, having dropped more than 100 pips during the day!). If the figure released had been worse than expected, the euro would most likely having surged back upward.

Personally, I love trading on Thursdays because the high volatility is great when you're using my hedging strategy (go to my strategy page if you're unfamiliar with it, it works!).

Go here for a quick guide on the major US economic indicators
Go here for the actual daily economic news calendar