Web Resources: Forex Factory

Forex Factory almost needs no introduction as I expect that almost everyone knows about it. However, for those that don’t it’s probably one of the largest and longest established forex trading portals around. It’s a site which I personally use on a daily basis and has a number of different components to it which are are discussed below

I use ForexFactory each day for it’s economic calendar where news releases are graded according to expected impact with a traffic light systems of yellow, amber and red. What’s more if you log in then it sets the release times to your own time zone which is very convenient. You can drill down on each release to find out details about it, who compiles it, historic release data and a chart of past values. About five minutes before a release if you refresh the page you get a little green update icon by the release and once the news has been release, clicking on this icon will update the page with the actual release value. Note that this isn’t instantaneous but it’s usually within about 30 seconds of the release – so it’s not a substitute for a squawk box but very useful nonetheless for finding out the release figure.

The Forex Factory forums are huge and well used. You can find all the usual discussions about trading strategies, EA’s and brokers. In general, the “signal to noise ratio” on the forum is rather low – there are a lot of micro-lot traders out there looking for some EA to make them rich and one has to wade through a lot of drivel to get to the useful nuggets. Having said that, there are also some really good threads on there from what appear to be successful traders, some of whom generously teach their methods on their threads. It’s a great place to get ideas though as I said one has to mine quite hard to come up with something of substance.

On this page there are plenty of news articles and analysis, supplied mostly by news services which are trying to get some business (which is fair enough). Personally I find watching such news feeds a distraction from trading with no real value but that’s just me.

ForexFactory have a great broker summary page where you can see a comparison table of some of the top forex brokers and their real-time spreads. Of course, there are always limitations to these sorts of tables but the FF staff have done some work in whittling down the list to those who are supposed to be properly regulated. They do state that FF gets a fee for the listing so it’s not entirely unbiased and representative and the table will therefore only consist of brokers who are willing to pay the fee but it’s a useful starting point

This is a useful little page if you want a quick overview of the market, along with a simple charting app which allows you to view one market on any time frame from 1 minute all the way up to monthly. Of course most traders will have their own charting but it’s a useful page for when you’re on the go.

This page allows you to follow traders who have signed up to their Trade Explorer service. This extracts live trades and analysis from trading accounts and posts this information on a summary table. This might be of interest for those who want the thrill of competing against other traders and coming top of the trading leaderboard and the table is populated by people with insanely high returns as you’d expect. Personally it’s not my cup of tea but each to their own

Forex Factory is a well established portal that is well used though definitely with a small retail trader bias. Nevertheless it has some very useful features and is definitely worth a regular visit.