Economic Calendar: How You Can Use It To Aid Your Investments

An economic calendar can help you stay ahead of economic events and their potential impact on the markets, currencies and investor sentiments. 

An economic calendar can be a very useful tool for investors and traders alike. As it stands, staying on top of economic news and events can give you an upper hand when it comes to investing and trading. Knowledge (and hard work) is power. 

Like it or not, the markets are constantly moving and changing. There’s a chance that economic events around the world or region can affect your own investments and trades. 

Here’s where an economic calendar can come in handy.

• What is an economic calendar?
• What is an example of an economic event?
• Why should you use an economic calendar?
• How can you use the economic calendar to your advantage?
• Free economic calendar
• Who can use an economic calendar? 
• Start investing and stay invested 

What is an economic calendar? 

An economic calendar is a useful tool that investors and traders can employ to monitor market-shifting events such as monetary policy decisions and even political changes. These events often have a high probability of impacting the financial markets some way or the other.   

What is an example of an economic event?

Financial meetings, political events and IPOs are common market-moving events. 

The release of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), inflation, unemployment and trade balance data are some other examples of economic events. 

The US Federal Reserve rate hikes, as well the performance of the US dollar (i.e. the world’s reserve currency), are some other economic events that many traders and investors pay attention to. 

Why should you use an economic calendar?

An economic calendar makes your life a tad easier by showing you the release schedule dates for major national and international economic events that will probably impact the price and popularity of certain global markets and/or financial assets. 

The majority of the events listed in an economic calendar fall into one of two categories: 

• projections of future financial or economic events
• reports on recent financial or economic events

Along with the release schedule dates of major economic events, you will often find more information pertaining to the particular event, such as the currency most likely to be impacted as well as related news and analysis for your further reading.     

Regardless of how active you are when it comes to investing or trading, or what time frame you trade across, it is important that you keep a watchful eye on upcoming economic events and macroeconomics data. This is particularly important if you aspire to be a fundamental or news trader. 

Having such information on hand and doing your due diligence ahead of time will put you in a better position to grab those investment and trading opportunities that might otherwise slip past you. For instance, you might want to buy more of certain assets and less of others or you might long or short a certain currency. 

How can you use the economic calendar to your advantage?

After you’ve picked an economic calendar that you think would fit your needs by taking into account its features and user-friendliness, spend some time learning how to navigate it. 

Be sure to customise the economic calendar according to your needs. While you’re at it, set it to your time-zone! 

It’s easy to build your very own unique economic calendar by making use of filters to display or hide economic events, major releases, forecasts and reports from certain regions of the world or the types of trades and asset classes you’re engaged in. 

An economic calendar is all the more useful if it shows you things that matter to you, your investments and trades! Having access to information that concerns you can help guide your own investment and trading decisions. 

Here are some pointers pertaining to the Investing.com economic calendar: 

• You can set your predetermined date range instead of choosing ‘Today’, ‘Tomorrow’, ‘This Week’ or ‘Next Week’ 
• Change it to your local timezone 
• Take the impact ratio with a pinch of salt
• Click on the event to get a better context of it
• Scroll down to read recent news articles as well as analysis that discuss more about the event(s). These will show up if they’re available  
• Toggle the top bar to view different types of calendar available for your perusal (i.e. Economic Calendar, Holidays Calendar, Earnings Calendar, Dividends Calendar, Splits Calendar, IPO Calendar, and Futures Expiry Calendar)  

Beyond the economic calendar, you can also set up your own portfolio on Investing.com to monitor your portfolio holdings and performance at a glance. It’s a nifty little tool for different types of asset classes like stocks, funds, indexes, commodities and currencies. 

Who can use an economic calendar? 

Regardless of whether you are a budding investor or someone who’s dabbled in various investment products over the years, you can use an economic calendar and customise it to suit your needs. There are paid subscriptions as well as free resources available. The Investing.com economic calendar is a free-of-charge option that you might want to consider using. 

An economic calendar isn’t restricted to DIY traders and investors. Even if you’re reliant on robo-advisors for the most part, you can still choose to pump in more funds in anticipation of major price movements that may occur!

Start investing and stay invested 

If you haven’t heard, the best time to invest is yesterday, and the next best time is today. 

Investing as early as you can lets compound interest work its magic over a longer time horizon. You can even make your babies millionaires by contributing to your children’s CPF early and consistently.   

It’s unsurprising one of the biggest financial regrets of SingSaver staffers like myself is that we didn’t start investing way earlier. 

Can’t wait to get your feet wet in the exhilarating and rewarding world of investing? Spend some time on this must-read guide for budding investors. While you’re at it, learn how to open a brokerage account and check out the best investment sign-up promotions! 

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Investment Guide: SingSaver’s One-Stop Investment Shop
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I’m 27 And I Accumulated My First $100,000 By Investing And Saving Over 4 Years
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