How to Use Forex Factory’s Free Trading Tools to Plan Around the News

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By Spencer Li, CFTe · Last updated: 26 October 2026

Forex Factory is a free website for traders. Across the top of every page sit six sections: Forums, Trades, News, Calendar, Market and Brokers. The Calendar comes first. It lists every scheduled economic release with its time, its currency and how much it is expected to move the market. Once you filter it down to the high and medium impact events on the currencies you trade, a glance each morning tells you what is due before you place a trade. The News feed, the Trade Explorer journal and the long and short numbers are useful too, as long as you know what each one is really measuring.

I checked every feature below on the live site on 26 October 2026, because a tools guide that describes last year’s buttons is worse than no guide at all.

Why would a swing trader use a forex website?

Here is an odd thing to admit in a post about Forex Factory. I hardly trade forex. As at 3 August 2026, only 8 of the 470 closed trades in my public trade log were currency pairs, and the rest were stocks, ETFs, commodities and crypto.

So why do I still open a website named after a market I barely touch?

Well, the calendar is the reason. The same US inflation number that moves the dollar also moves gold, the Nasdaq and Bitcoin, often in the same minute, so a free list of when each number lands is useful whatever you trade. My own trading plan says to close or reduce positions before major news, and that rule only works if you know when the news is coming.

How do you set up the Forex Factory calendar?

In September 2022, a trader in Eastern Europe asked on Reddit’s r/Forex what time zone the calendar used. It was the morning of a US inflation release, the calendar said 8:30am, and they had no idea whose 8:30am it meant.

That problem has mostly gone away. When I opened the calendar on 26 October 2026, without logging in, it already showed Singapore time, because the site now matches your device clock. If yours looks wrong, click the clock in the header of any page, where you can pick “Match Automatically” or choose your zone from a list, and the site adjusts for daylight saving, which saves you one twice-a-year mistake.

The bigger job is the filter. Out of the box the calendar shows everything, from central bank decisions down to bank holidays in New Zealand, and a list that long trains you to ignore all of it. Click Filter at the top right and you get four groups of settings.

Do note the word Expected. The colours are a forecast of impact, set before the number comes out, and the red ones are the events most likely to move price during your session.

It is worth keeping USD ticked even if you never trade the dollar. US data moves almost everything else. I once told my community to “read less news, focus on the charts”, since only one or two news items a week really move the market and the rest is noise. A filtered calendar is how you find those one or two without reading the rest.

If you would rather check the week once and get on with your day, my free 15-minute swing trader checklist is the daily routine I use myself.

What does each row on the calendar tell you?

Each row has a time, a currency, an impact folder and the event name, followed by three numbers: Actual, Forecast and Previous. The forecast is what economists expect, and the actual is filled in when the number lands. The gap between those two is what the market trades, which I explain in more detail in my guide to the NFP jobs report.

The most underrated button sits in the Detail column. Most people never click it. The small folder opens a panel with the event’s specs and a history of past releases. When I opened the US consumer confidence row, it told me the number comes from The Conference Board, is built from a survey of about 3,000 households, and is released on the last Tuesday of each month. That is a free economics lesson.

The panel also has a line called Usual Effect, and that line confuses people. In January 2022, a trader on Reddit’s r/Forex asked “why does under «Usual effect» forexfactory say greater CPI is good”. It is a fair question. Hot inflation sounds like bad news for everyone.

The answer sits a few lines lower, under Why Traders Care. Rising prices push a central bank towards higher interest rates, and higher rates tend to make a currency more attractive to hold. So a hotter inflation number is usually good for the currency, even on a day when it is bad for stocks. My guide to the CPI walks through why.

They still have a point, though, and I would rather say so. “Usual” is doing a lot of work in that heading. In my weekly outlook on 11 December 2025, I said the Fed’s quarter-point cut “was already priced in”, because it matched what almost everyone expected. Small caps still jumped above their October high around 3am Singapore time and then slid back after the close. Part of the reason was that three of the twelve voting members had disagreed with the decision, a detail that no column on the calendar could hold.

How is the News feed different from the calendar?

The calendar tells you what is coming. The News page tells you what just happened, and it grades it differently.

On the calendar, the colour is an expectation. On the News page, Forex Factory’s own legend says every breaking story is rated high, medium or low “depending on how much it impacted the market”. So a red folder on the calendar is a forecast, while a red tag on a news story is a verdict. Once you notice that, the two pages stop looking like duplicates.

The stories are picked by Forex Factory’s own economists, who watch the markets around the clock, and members can submit stories too. For a swing trader holding positions for days, one look at the high impact stories before placing a trade does the same job as the filtered calendar. Reading the feed all day is how the noise gets back in.

Reading the news once a day is a habit, and habits are easier to keep with a routine. The free 15-minute swing trader checklist is the one I run.

What does the Market page actually show?

Older guides, including the version of this one that sat on my site until today, described the Market Scanner as a way to see how price reacted to past news. The site’s own user guide disagrees.

The Market page tracks 41 forex instruments around the clock, with prices pulled together from more than a dozen sources, so that no single broker’s feed decides the quote. The Scanner gives you a broad view of current conditions at a glance, with twelve metrics you can choose from, such as how far a pair has moved over the last 30 minutes or the last 12 hours.

It is a dashboard for today. If you want to see how a pair behaved around a past release, the History table and the Graph column on the calendar are the closer fit.

Is the Trade Explorer a good trading journal?

The Trade Explorer connects to your brokerage account and builds a performance report from your trades, with what Forex Factory calls hundreds of metrics. It works only with MetaTrader 4 or MetaTrader 5 accounts, you can create up to 16 of them, and it syncs with your account every few minutes.

Two details give away its audience. It reports market movement in pips rather than profit, and its statistics follow the format used by hedge funds and commodity trading advisers. Forex Factory says plainly that it was designed for experienced traders.

So if you trade forex on MetaTrader, it saves you the boring part of journaling. If you trade stocks or ETFs like most of my trades, you will need a different tool, and the habit matters more than the software anyway. I explain how to build one that finds your edge in my post on trading journals.

Should you trust the long and short numbers?

On the Trades page there is a box called Positions, which shows what share of traders are long or short on each instrument. When I looked at about 3:45pm Singapore time on 26 October 2026, the gold row showed 135 traders long and 77 short.

That is 212 people. The data is sourced from traders using the Trade Explorer, so it only counts people who chose to connect an account and let it be shown.

History has a famous lesson about samples like that. In 1936 an American magazine, The Literary Digest, mailed its election poll to about ten million people. 2.38 million replied, and the poll predicted that Alf Landon would beat Franklin Roosevelt comfortably. Roosevelt won every state except Maine and Vermont. The poll missed by a landslide.

Size was fine. Later research found that the main cause was who chose to reply, since people who disliked Roosevelt were keener to send their ballot back. A sentiment box built from volunteers has the same weakness. It tells you what a self-selected group of Forex Factory users is doing, which can be quite different from what the market is doing.

Is the Forex Factory forum worth your time?

Forex Factory says its forums carry more posts than any other financial forum in the world. Thread starters can even limit posting to members who have reached a certain rank on the site, which helps keep the better threads readable.

It is a good place to see how other traders think. Every strategy there is best tested on a demo account before any real money goes near it, because a forum post shows you the trades someone chose to share, which is the Literary Digest problem again.

FAQ

Is Forex Factory free?
Yes. The calendar, news, market data, forums and the Positions box are free to view. You need a free account for features such as alerts and the Trade Explorer.

How do I change the time zone on Forex Factory?
Click the clock in the header of any page. Choose “Match Automatically” to use your device’s time zone, or pick one from the list. The site adjusts for daylight saving by itself.

What do the colours on the Forex Factory calendar mean?
Red is high impact expected, orange is medium, yellow is low, and grey is non-economic, such as a bank holiday. On the News page the same colours rate how much a story actually moved the market.

Which impact levels should I filter for?
Red and orange is a sensible start, on USD plus the currencies you trade. Forex Factory itself rates yellow as low impact, so it is the easiest group to drop.

Which platforms does the Trade Explorer support?
As at 26 October 2026, only MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 brokerage accounts.

Is the Forex Factory sentiment data accurate?
It is accurate for the people it counts, which are traders who connected a Trade Explorer. That group is self-selected, so treat it as a rough mood read rather than a picture of the whole market.

Which part of Forex Factory do you open first, and has a red folder ever caught you holding a position you forgot about? Let me know in the comments.

If you want the bigger picture on currencies, my guide to forex trading covers the market these tools were built for, and my free trading guides collect the rest.

And if you want a daily routine that fits around a full-time job, grab the free 15-minute swing trader checklist.

About the author. Spencer Li is The 15-Minute Trader and the founder of Synapse Trading. He is a Certified Financial Technician (CFTe) with 15+ years of trading, run from 70+ countries. He holds a B.Acc and B.BM from SMU. Every trade he takes is public, dated, losses left in. He teaches rules-based swing trading in 15 minutes a day, one system for any market.

Education, not financial advice. Synapse Trading is not licensed by MAS to advise on investment products. Trading carries risk of loss, and past performance is not indicative of future results.

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Educational content only, not personalised financial advice. Trading carries risk, including loss of capital. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Synapse Trading is not licensed or regulated by MAS.