This web-based application of mine is big, ranking 6th place out of 880,000 in Google and 3rd place out of 7,990,000 in Yahoo for search keywords "Forex Economic Calendar". Available at FxFisherman.com, it is being used heavily by many forex traders around the world. Plus, about one hundred website owners have integrated my forex economic calendar into their websites, which is kind of cool for me.
To be honest with you, I was inspired by the ForexFactory.com's Economic Calendar. I liked how the data was presented and how the volatility icons were shown. I added some innovative features including the price direction indicator, the future chart indicator, the count-down widget and the Web 2.0 AJAXified user interface. The underlying data is completely different from that of ForexFactory.
One of the reasons that I created this application was that I needed to make money in forex trading. I believed the price movements especially the ones with large spikes were not entirely random. I thought if I could capture these movements, I would be rich before I knew it. So the research begins. After hours and days analyzing currency charts, I noticed some patterns of large spikes. On the first Friday, sometimes Thursday, of each month around 13:30, all currency pairs change about 1% of its value in matter of minutes. Many traders already knew about this, but as a lone trader I didn't. I began tracking the sources of market force behind it, and then I found this economic data release called US Non-Farm Payroll, NFP or Employment Situation which is published at 13:30 sharp by U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. I knew I was right. The moment this piece of data was released, the financial market became wild. The swings in price confirmed my findings. Now that I could time when the market is moved, all I needed to know more is the direction of the market. You don't need to be 100% correct reading the direction. Only 60% is enough to gain the edge to make more profits than losses. After days studying the data, I finally figured it out. I wrote this algorithm to predict the direction. It has been perfect. This economic calendar is literally a money printing machine if you know what you are doing.
