Using Econonomic News to Supercharge Your Forex Trading Profits

Most forex traders I know use charts and technical analysis to make their forex trades, and are taught by so called “gurus” to completely avoid the market when news comes out, and in many cases, to even take off trades before news. My question is, why avoid trading during a period where price action actually behaves sensibly? In other words, price action actually moves due to traders’ reactions to new information about the economic state of a country, rather than some pattern or price level that may or may not have any predictive ability.

Should you trust the news in your forex trading?
Save some time and watch for only the high probability trading opportunities
News isn’t something you should avoid. News is the only thing that you know for sure moves the market. News has a much longer effect than just the knee jerk reaction immediately after the release and the next 5 minutes. The reason why news time has such a bad rap among traders is that many news events create random, whipsawing price action that can easily take out stops. So what does one do? Avoid trading during and after useless news events and only stick with ones that have strong cause-effect relationships (i.e. a surprise in the economic data has a high probability of producing a strong, one-directional move in a currency pair). These are:

Interest rate announcements, statements, press conferences (including US FOMC minutes)
Retail sales
Manufacturing PMI, Chicago PMI, Ivey PMI
Inflation/CPI
German ZEW, IFO surveys
US Employment (Non-farm payrolls),
Canadian employment

3 ways to use news in your trading
Analyzing sentiment (and thus direction) using news releases can be a very powerful element of your forex trading strategy. I’m not talking about chasing the market after a news release- I’m talking about professional, calculated, profitable forex trading. Here are some ways to combine forex news trading with technical analysis so that you have a better chance of getting both the direction and timing right during your trades.

1.Look for breakout due to important news surprise.
Out of all the forex technical analysis methods out there, I don’t think any are as powerful as watching how price reacts to weekly (or even daily) highs and lows. All other things equal, if price breaks a high, it’s likely to continue going up, and vice versa for lows. The reason why such a simple strategy as this can result in depleted accounts is because it doesn’t take into account the momentum and behavior of the market. If you consider that the GBP/USD traders are reacting strongly to a surprise in the amount of retail sales in the UK, however, then a sustained upward move beyond the break of the high looks more likely, doesn’t it?

2.Trade retracement of a news spike.
The easy days of waiting for a surprise in scheduled economic data and buying up a currency are long gone, as the competition is too fierce and brokers have implemented measures to make this practically impossible. However, that’s not to say that we can’t get into the move after the original price spike following the release. If you keep your eye on a 4-hour chart and see a clear break of a recent channel or weekly high after a surprise in economic data, wait for a retracement back down to the high and buy there.

3.Fade an “irrational” news move.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen price rocket upward 50-100 pips after a release only to come back down to right where it started a few hours later. Usually what happens is one of two things. First, the deviation between the market’s prediction and the actual economic number might be small (e.g. US retail sales is +0.3% vs. 0.1% expected), but nevertheless enough of a surprise to throw the market off and spur buying, or second, the news release turns out to be better than expected while in the recent past nearly all releases have been negative. In these situations I would look for a nearby technical resistance level, such as a weekly high, and short price when it gets to that level. Of course vice versa for the opposite scenario.

Copied from TFF