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Forex Factory: the complete guide (2026)

Updated June 2026 · By the FXLiquidityHub team · ~12 min read

Forex Factory is the most-used free resource in retail trading — and most people use barely 10% of it. This guide shows you exactly how to read the economic calendar, what the colored folders mean, which events actually move price, and a complete step-by-step strategy for trading (or surviving) the news.

What Forex Factory actually is

Forex Factory is a long-running forex information website. Traders know it mainly for one thing — its economic calendar — but the site is really a bundle of free tools that together answer the question every trader needs answered before they click buy or sell: what is about to happen, and is now a safe time to trade?

The core pieces are the economic calendar (scheduled news and data releases), a live news feed, a market-hours / session clock, and a large community forum where traders share systems, journals and analysis. You don’t need an account to use the calendar, but a free login lets you save your filter settings so the calendar opens the way you like every time.

For a trader using a structured method — like the Smart Money Concepts and Candle Range Theory we teach — Forex Factory is not where you find your entries. It’s where you find out which sessions and which hours are landmines. Your edge lives on the chart; Forex Factory tells you when the market is about to be hijacked by an outside event so your clean setup doesn’t get blown apart by a number nobody can predict.

How to read the economic calendar

The calendar is a simple table, but each column tells you something important. Reading it fluently takes about five minutes to learn and saves you from a lot of avoidable losses.

Here’s what each column means:

• Time — when the event releases, shown in your timezone once you set it. This is the most important column for risk: it tells you when to be flat.
• Currency — which currency the event affects (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY…). A USD event moves every pair with USD in it — EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY — and also gold (XAUUSD), which is priced in dollars.
• Impact — the colored folder ranking expected volatility (covered in detail below). This is your filter.
• Event — the name of the release (Non-Farm Payrolls, CPI, Interest Rate Decision, PMI…).
• Actual — the released number, which appears the moment the news drops.
• Forecast — what economists expected. The market has usually already priced this in.
• Previous — last period’s number, for context.

Red, orange & yellow folders explained

The colored folder in the Impact column is Forex Factory’s estimate of how much volatility an event is likely to cause. Learning to filter by these is the single most useful habit on the site.

Folder	Impact	What it means for you
Red	High	Can move the market violently in seconds. Rate decisions, NFP, CPI. Be flat around these.
Orange	Medium	Can cause a noticeable move. Worth knowing about; reduce size around them.
Yellow	Low	Rarely moves price. Mostly background noise you can ignore.

For most retail traders the workflow is simple: filter the calendar to red folders only for the currencies you trade, and treat those times as no-trade windows unless you are deliberately trading the news. Add orange folders once you’re comfortable. Yellow folders almost never need your attention.

The news events that move the market

A handful of releases cause the large majority of news-driven volatility. If you only learn these, you’ll know what 90% of the red folders mean.

Interest-rate decisions (the heavyweight)

When a central bank — the Federal Reserve (FOMC), ECB, Bank of England, etc. — announces rates, it’s usually the highest-impact scheduled event there is. It’s not just the rate number; the accompanying statement and the press conference can move the market for hours. The Fed’s FOMC decisions affect the dollar and, through it, almost everything.

Inflation — CPI

The Consumer Price Index tells the market whether inflation is rising or cooling, which drives expectations of future rate moves. US CPI is one of the most-watched red folders of the month and routinely whipsaws gold and the major dollar pairs.

Employment — Non-Farm Payrolls (NFP)

Released on the first Friday of each month, NFP reports US job creation. It’s famous for sharp, two-way spikes in the first minute. Beginners are drawn to it and burned by it more than any other release.

Growth & activity — GDP, PMI, retail sales

GDP (overall growth), PMI (purchasing managers’ surveys, a fast read on the economy) and retail sales round out the medium-to-high impact data. They matter most when they surprise sharply against forecast.

Setting it up correctly — 5 steps

A correctly configured calendar takes two minutes and prevents the most common beginner accident: trading into news because the times were wrong.

1. Set your timezone. Open the time settings at the top of the calendar and select your timezone and 12/24-hour format. If this is wrong, every event time is wrong.
2. Filter by currency. Show only the currencies in the pairs you trade. If you trade XAUUSD, EURUSD and GBPUSD, you mainly care about USD, EUR and GBP.
3. Filter by impact. Switch on red (high) and optionally orange (medium); hide yellow. Now the calendar shows only what can actually hurt or help you.
4. Switch the view to the week. Look at the whole week on Sunday or Monday so you know in advance which days and hours are dangerous.
5. Save it (free account). Log in so your filters stick, and the calendar opens clean every time.

The news trading strategy

There are two valid ways to use the calendar: avoid the news (the right default for most traders) and trade the news (advanced). We’ll cover both, because knowing how to avoid it well is itself a strategy.

Strategy 1 — the no-trade window (default)

This is what disciplined traders do most of the time. Around every red folder you trade, define a window — roughly 15 minutes before to 15–30 minutes after — where you take no new trades and, ideally, are flat or protected on open ones. Why:

• Spreads widen. In the seconds around a release, your broker’s spread can blow out, turning a good entry into an instant loss.
• Slippage and gaps. Stops don’t fill where you expect; price can leap straight through them.
• Whipsaw. The first move often reverses violently — the market hunts both sides’ stops before choosing a direction.

If you’re on a prop-firm challenge, this discipline is doubly important: a single news spike can breach a daily loss limit in one candle. Standing aside isn’t weakness — it’s the highest-expectancy decision you can make in that 30-minute window.

Strategy 2 — trading the move after the spike (advanced)

Once you understand market structure, you can trade the news without gambling on the number. The key idea: don’t trade the release — trade the structure that forms after it.

1. Let the initial spike happen. The first 1–5 minutes are chaos: a sharp move, often a fake-out, then a snap back. Do not enter here.
2. Mark the range. The spike usually carves out a clear high and low. That range is now the liquidity map — stops sit beyond both edges.
3. Wait for the sweep + shift. Often price runs one side of that range (grabs the liquidity) and then breaks structure the other way. That break of structure after a liquidity sweep is your signal — the same Smart Money sequence we teach, just triggered by news.
4. Enter on the retrace. Take the entry when price pulls back into the order block or fair-value gap left by the move, in the new direction.
5. Size down. Use half your normal risk. Post-news conditions are faster and spreads can still be wider than usual.

Position sizing & risk around news

Whatever you do, news days are when risk management earns its keep. Keep per-trade risk at 0.5–1%, never widen a stop to “survive” a spike, and if you’re already down for the day, the calendar tells you to do less, not more. The traders who blow accounts on news days almost always do it by sizing up to “catch the big move” — the exact opposite of what the moment calls for.

Sessions & the market hours tool

Forex Factory’s market-hours tool shows the Sydney, Tokyo, London and New York sessions and where they overlap. This matters because volatility and liquidity aren’t constant through the day:

• London open and the London–New York overlap are the highest-liquidity, highest-movement hours — prime time for most strategies.
• The Asian session is usually quieter and more range-bound.
• Combining the session clock with the calendar tells you the full picture: a red folder during the London–NY overlap is far more explosive than the same event in a thin session.

How each major release behaves (and how to trade it)

Knowing an event is “high impact” isn’t enough — each one has its own personality. Here’s how the big three actually behave on the chart and what that means for your decisions.

FOMC / interest-rate decisions

This is a two-part event. First the rate number and statement drop; then, often 30 minutes later, the press conference begins. The first move is frequently not the move that lasts — the market reprices repeatedly as the chair speaks. For most traders the correct play is to be completely flat through the announcement and the first 15–20 minutes of the conference, then look for the structure that forms once the dust settles. Rate decisions can set the tone for days, so a clean break of structure after FOMC is often worth more than a normal-day setup. On gold (XAUUSD) the reaction is amplified, because gold is sensitive both to the dollar and to interest-rate expectations.

CPI (inflation)

CPI is a pure surprise event: the market has a forecast baked in, and price explodes on the gap between actual and forecast. A hotter-than-expected number typically lifts the dollar (and pressures gold); a cooler number does the reverse. The first candle is brutal and often fakes one way before reversing. Treat the post-CPI range exactly like the strategy above — wait for the sweep of one side, then trade the break of structure the other way. CPI days are some of the cleanest “sweep then shift” setups of the month if you wait.

Non-Farm Payrolls (NFP)

NFP, the first Friday of each month, is the most over-traded release in retail. The jobs number, the unemployment rate and the wages figure can all pull in different directions, which is why the first minute is so violent and so often reversed. The mistake is treating NFP as a coin flip you must bet on. The professional read is the opposite: NFP hands you a fresh, obvious liquidity range within minutes — let it form, let one side get swept, and trade the reaction. There is no prize for being in the first candle.

A real week on the calendar — worked example

Here’s how a disciplined trader actually uses Forex Factory across a week. Suppose you trade XAUUSD, EURUSD and GBPUSD.

• Sunday night: open the calendar in week view, filtered to USD/EUR/GBP red folders. You spot three landmines: US CPI on Wednesday 8:30am, the ECB rate decision Thursday, and a Bank of England speaker Friday.
• Monday–Tuesday: no red folders. You trade your normal plan with full focus — these are your “clean” days.
• Wednesday: you avoid new trades from 8:15am and stay flat through CPI. The number comes in hot, gold spikes down, sweeps the morning low, then breaks structure up. You take the retrace into the order block at half size and catch the afternoon move.
• Thursday: ECB day. EUR pairs are off-limits around the decision and the press conference. You trade GBP and gold instead, away from the euro noise.
• Friday: a single orange/red GBP speaker — you simply size down on cable for the day.

Notice what happened: the calendar didn’t give you a single entry. It gave you a map of when to be careful, which protected your good days and turned the one news event you traded into a planned, structured setup rather than a gamble.

The forums, news feed & other tools

Beyond the calendar, two other parts of Forex Factory are worth knowing about:

• The news feed aggregates headlines from multiple sources in real time. It’s useful for understanding why price is moving when there’s no scheduled release — a surprise headline, geopolitical event, or central-bank comment.
• The forums are one of the largest trading communities online. There are decades of threads on systems, indicators and journals. The value is real but mixed: treat it as a place to find ideas and see how others think, not as a source of signals to copy. The most valuable thread on the whole site is arguably any long-running, brutally honest trading journal — reading one is a free education in how trading psychology actually plays out over months.

How Forex Factory fits the FXLiquidityHub method

Our approach is built on Smart Money Concepts, Candle Range Theory and top-down analysis — reading where liquidity sits and trading the break of structure after it’s taken. Forex Factory is the missing risk layer around that edge. The chart tells you where to trade; the calendar tells you when not to, and occasionally hands you a high-octane version of your favourite setup right after a red release. Used together, they turn a good method into a complete, risk-aware routine: analyse top-down on the weekend, mark the week’s news windows, trade your setups on the clean hours, and stand aside (or size down) when the calendar says the market is about to be moved by something no chart can predict.

Common mistakes

• Wrong timezone. The number-one accident — trading straight into news because the times were off.
• Reacting to “good” vs “bad”. The market trades the surprise versus forecast, not your opinion of the number.
• Trading the first spike. The opening move is usually a stop-hunt; chasing it is how accounts get hurt.
• Ignoring orange folders. Medium-impact data can still move price enough to stop you out.
• Sizing up for news. Bigger size into higher volatility is the formula for a blown day.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides & tools

Educational content, not financial advice. Forex Factory is a third-party site; features may change — confirm details on forexfactory.com.