People often ask me questions like "what just happened to the pound?", "Why did EUR/JPY just take a dive?", or "what made gold spike up?" and I thought I'd put together a little tutorial that might help traders stay on top of breaking economic news.
Before anything else, if you're not actively checking an economic calendar to see what's on the docket for the day, you're doing it wrong. Reviewing an economic calendar before each trade session is where you start.
After that, we still need a feed of some sort that helps us get an idea of what the market's actively doing or what ad-hoc news might be coming down the pipe. For that, let's use Twitter (and their TweetDeck tool.)
The first thing we will need is either a new Twitter account dedicated just for FX news or be comfortable with filtering down to specific followers should we already have an account we want to use registered.
If you don't have a Twitter account, or want to make a new one specifically for this (which I recommend,) create one now:
Select "use email instead" when making this new account, and pick an email you are comfortable using that isn't already associated with another Twitter account.
Skip making your bio, skip adding friends from your contacts, and [important] once Twitter suggests who you should follow just skip this step too by clicking next. Do not follow anyone just yet, we want this to be a clean slate.
Now, follow these accounts by clicking each link and slapping that follow button:
ForexLive
LiveSquawk
NewsSquawk
FirstSquawk
ECB
Federal Reserve
Bank of England
Bank of Canada
Bank of Japan
Swiss National Bank
(Why various countries feel their central bank needs a Twitter account is beyond me, but hey...)
Finally, if you want a little more spice in your Twitter feed, add Trump and the Central Bank of Jamaica:
realDonaldTrump
CentralBankJA
Ok, now we have a decent list of news sources to populate our feed. The next step is to get them streaming, and that's where TweetDeck comes in.
TweetDeck used to be a 3rd party service until Twitter bought them out. Now it's an included (but highly underused and underappreciated) feature. On the same browser you've signed into Twitter, go to the following URL:
https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
You'll be greeted with 4 columns by default.
Let's make some changes:
- 1 Remove the Notifications, Messages, and Trending columns by clicking the 'settings' icon on the right-hand side of each column's title, and going to "remove". (Obviously do not do this to the Home column.)
- 2 At the bottom left of the web page, go to the account settings gear icon:
Now adjust the following settings: Turn the theme to "dark", change the column width to "wide", and set the font size to "smallest" like this...
Finally, you should be looking at a well-formatted single-column tab you can then adjust to place next to your trading platform of choice and it can be your go-to for "what in the heck just happened!?!" type questions before you bug other traders like some n00b!
Ain't it beautiful? :D Now as new news gets released by any of the sources you added, you'll see it at the top of this column automatically. No need to refresh the page, no need to drill down to a given news agency's profile page, just streaming news as it breaks onto the scene.
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