The economic calendar is not a schedule of news; it is a schedule of expectations being marked to market. Prices move not because a number is good or bad, but because it differs from what was already priced in. Learn to read the three columns — prior, forecast, actual — and the calendar stops being noise.
The three columns
- Forecast is the market consensus — by release time it is largely in the price already.
- Actual versus forecast is the surprise, and the surprise is what moves price in the first seconds.
- The revision of the previous figure is the column amateurs skip: a strong headline with a sharp downward revision is a much weaker print than it looks.
What actually moves your pairs
Not all red icons are equal. US CPI and non-farm payrolls reprice the dollar against everything; central-bank rate decisions and the press conferences after them move their home currency for hours, not minutes; PMI surveys matter most when an economy sits near the boundary between growth and contraction. A release moves a pair through one channel only: interest-rate expectations. If a number cannot plausibly change what a central bank does next, it rarely sustains a move.
Trading around releases
Two honest approaches exist. React after the print, accepting a worse price for dramatically better information. Or position before it with a size small enough that either outcome is survivable — see our note on position sizing. What does not work is full size thirty seconds before the number: spreads widen into major releases and execution around the print is a lottery by design.
The full calendar, filtered by importance and time zone, runs live on our Tools page.