Trading the news

In order to read news events, you should familiarise yourself with economic indicators​​, which are macroeconomic factors that have an impact on all financial markets, whether it be forex, shares or indices. These can include changes to interest rates, inflation, unemployment levels or retail income for a specific country and these all have a significant effect on the financial markets and overall state of the economy.

Economic announcements often involve these particular factors when advising traders of recent changes within the markets. This can have an impact on market sentiment​​, especially if the data announcement is not in line with what the traders had been expecting.

A news trading strategy involves trading based on market expectations, both before and after a news release. Trading on news announcements can require you to make quick decisions, as the financial markets may be impacted almost immediately. Therefore, you will need to make quick judgements on how to trade the announcement.

As with other asset classes, forex trading news can become particularly active before and following major economic events. However, there are significant differences between the type of news that sets apart currencies from other financial markets.

Forex markets tend to respond the most to macroeconomic news – the kind of developments that reflect or impact broad economies. Generally speaking, forex traders can look at economic news to assess its impact on interest rates and monetary policy​. News that suggests a more hawkish (aggressive) central bank tends to push forex pairs up in value relative to other currencies, while dovish (peaceful) news can cause a currency to depreciate.

Currencies of countries that are major exporters of raw materials or commodities can be impacted by news forex trading news, as this affects the prices of the main commodities that they produce. These currencies are often referred to as resource currencies. Prices of commodities that affect these currencies can be influenced by issues affecting supply and demand.

On the supply side, news that suggests a lower supply can push up prices, while news that suggests higher supply can depress prices, which can then impact related currencies. News that could reflect changes in supply may cover political tensions, wars, terrorism, weather, economic sanctions, labour relations (strikes) and more. Speculation and pricing related to demand is mainly influenced by many of the same major news releases noted above, plus commodity inventory reports and outlooks.

In order to come up with a comprehensive forex trading strategy using news releases, forex traders tend to look out for certain key forex indicators that can have an impact on interest-rate speculation, including:

Stock trading based on news releases is a strategy used by many long-term investors, as well as short-term traders. If a company has strong balance sheets, cash flows and earnings reports consistently, then a trader may decide to buy and hold the share for a longer period of time.

However, if a company releases a report with considerably lower financials than expected, this can cause a rally for traders to short the stock as its value is decreasing. Traders can perform company analysis before deciding whether to invest in a stock. This includes analysing its growth rate potential, as well as any potential legal, political or insolvency risks. Financial ratios such as price/earnings along with dividend yields can also indicate whether a stock is a healthy investment right now.

Our Morningstar equity research reports are updated regularly with new information about company fundamentals. These are available for a wide range of shares on our platform and can also indicate whether they are considered to be overvalued, fairly valued or undervalued within the stock market. This information may help traders to make a decision on whether to enter a position or not. Register for a live account now to access our Morningstar reports.

Some brokers offer automated news trading signals that can help a trader to make decisions on whether to enter, exit or avoid a trade. These hints are based on price fluctuations after a certain type of news release and can prompt traders to either buy or sell an asset.

A manual alternative is to monitor upcoming tradeable events using our economic calendar. This feature can be found on our Next Generation platform and highlights events such as unemployment reports, GDP, CPI and PPI figures, as well as trade reports and sentiment surveys. These events can all have an effect on market sentiment and cause major price swings within the financial markets.

Of course, there are drawbacks of news-based trading as well. In particular, news trading requires expert fundamental analysis skills, as you will need to understand how certain economic announcements can affect your positions and the wider financial market.

There is also the risk of carrying positions for a longer period of time. If the news release requires a few days or weeks to materialise, your trading positions may be open over several days. This brings overnight risk and may require you to pay additional holding costs. Therefore, traders should ensure that they have sufficient funds in their account to cover these costs.

Open an account with CMC Markets to access our multitude of news and analysis tools. It is wise to keep up to date with the ever-changing financial markets. You can choose to trade on news reports through either a spread betting or CFD account, so read our article about the differences between spread bets and CFDs​ to get started.

As discussed, our online trading platform, Next Generation, releases regular news and analysis articles for all financial markets. We also provide fundamental analysis reports from Morningstar, as well as market commentaries and updates from Reuters news on our news and insights section of the platform. By following our news, this ensures that you are always up-to-date with the latest trends and changes within the financial markets, as well as general economic announcements.

Our award-winning platform* is available for mobile and tablet devices, including iOS and Android systems. Complete with all the regular charting features, these mobile applications make it easy to trade and monitor news announcements on-the-go. You can also set up trading alerts for both desktop and mobile and choose to receive push notifications via the app, email or SMS. Reading more about our trading alerts.