How to Use Forex Factory: The Calendar Routine Funded Traders Need

Forex Factory's calendar answers one question better than any free tool: what time is the market about to move on data rather than on price.

Read it in the same order every week, set the clock to your own time zone, filter it down to the high-impact events, and you get the one thing a funded trader needs around news, which is warning.

What follows is how to work the calendar so that window never costs you money you had already earned.

What the calendar actually shows you

The calendar itself sits at forexfactory.com/calendar and costs nothing to read.

Open the weekly view and every row gives you five facts: the release time, the currency it belongs to, an impact rating, the name of the event, and three numbers comparing what was expected with what came out and with the month before.

Traders who are new to the calendar read the name of the event and stop there, which is why the weekly view looks like a wall of jargon at first.

The three numbers are the part that teaches you something, because a release only moves price when it lands away from the forecast, and knowing the previous month's figure is what makes the surprise visible in a second rather than after the candle has already printed.

Non-Farm Payrolls is the well known example. It is the United States employment report, published on the first Friday of most months, and it carries the highest impact rating on the board.

Consumer price index, central bank rate decisions and gross domestic product releases sit in the same tier, and the rows underneath them carry medium and low ratings.

Nobody has to trade all of them; what you need to know is which ones land while a position is open.

Read the impact rating first, then the time

Almost every prop firm rule that mentions news is written in terms of the impact tier, which is why the rating is the first column worth your attention.

Forex Factory marks each event with a rating that ranges from low through medium to high, and the high tier is what most published rule sets call a red-folder or high-impact event.

Where those firms usually draw the line, and how the wording differs between them, is the subject of the news trading restrictions explainer.

Sort the week by that rating and the number of events you actually need to plan around drops from a few hundred to a handful.

The time is the second read, and it matters more than the rating once you know your firm's rule.

A high-impact release at 3:30 in the afternoon in New York happens while the London desk is still trading and while plenty of retail traders are at their screens.

The same release overnight, when your own session is closed, cannot affect a position you are not holding.

Set the filters once, then stop touching them

Forex Factory lets you filter the calendar by impact level, by currency, and by the hours you care about, and it lets you set the time zone the whole page displays.

Do that once, properly, on the first day you use it, because a calendar still showing server time is worse than no calendar at all when a red-folder event is the thing you are trying to avoid.

Set the time zone to the one your trading day runs on, filter the impact level to high, and filter currencies down to the pairs you actually trade. Whatever is left on the screen is your week.

Bookmark the weekly view for planning and open the day view each morning, since both show the same rows and Monday morning is the wrong moment to discover a rate decision on Wednesday.

The "All Day" flag, and why it matters to your account

Some events on the calendar are stamped All Day rather than given a release time, usually a bank holiday, or a data release that arrives without a fixed hour. That flag is not decoration.

SFX Funded's published rule counts red-folder events from the calendar as news-restricted, and specifically excludes the ones marked All Day on the basis that they have no specific release time to build a window around.

So the All Day rows are the ones you can leave alone, and the rows with a clock on them are the ones that need writing down.

That single distinction is the reason to read the calendar yourself rather than trusting a summary. A list of "high-impact events this week" that ignores the time column tells you nothing about which of them your account is exposed to.

Check the time next to the colour, every time.

Two consequences follow from that wording, and both are practical. First, a position you opened before the window is not exempt: if its stop or target sits close enough to trigger during those 4 minutes, the fill itself is what falls inside the rule.

Second, the rule binds your orders rather than your opinion, so an order you placed days ago can still breach it.

If you want to hold through a release, the safe version is to move the stop and the target clear of the release, or to close before the window opens and re-enter after it shuts.

Price does not care that the rule exists, and an unusually fast move can reach a stop that looked comfortably far away when you set it.

Leaving more room than usual around a red-folder event is the boring version of risk management, and boring is the point when you are trading a funded account with a daily loss limit attached to it.

What happens if a trade lands in the window

The rule also names what it calls manipulation, and that list is not about timing mistakes.

News straddling, where you park buy and sell orders either side of a release to catch the breakout, and news bracketing, which is the same idea dressed up with wider stops, are both prohibited.

So is anything designed to game the simulated environment into passing a challenge. Read that as the difference between an accidental fill and a strategy built on the release itself.

News trading during the challenge phase

There is a version of news trading that stays open on an SFX account. During the challenge phase news trading is permitted, with the caution that announcements bring more volatility than most traders price in, and the same bans on straddling and bracketing apply throughout.

Practically, that means the calendar is more useful during an evaluation than most traders realise.

A release you would have ignored becomes a reminder to check exposure, and the habit you build while chasing a profit target is the same habit that keeps a funded account alive later.

The evaluation is where you learn to read the week, and the funded account is where that reading earns its keep.

How much time you want to spend around news is also a fair way to pick between the three routes, and the plan comparison puts 2-Step, Rapid and Instant side by side in one pass.

The routine, and how long it takes

Ten minutes a week, plus a check each morning. On Friday afternoon, open the weekly view and look at the coming five days: write the high-impact releases into the calendar or the journal you actually use, with the time converted to your own clock.

On Sunday, before the market opens, plan which of those windows you will sit out and which you will trade around, and size the week's positions with the quiet hours in mind.

Each trading morning, open the day view and check what is coming in the next few hours, then set an alert 15 minutes before anything high-impact lands so the reminder arrives while you can still act on it.

That alert lives in your trading platform rather than in the calendar, and the shortlist of tools funded traders actually reach for covers which of them carry a usable economic calendar.

Set the alert and it does the remembering for you, because nobody misses a red-folder event they were warned about 15 minutes beforehand, while plenty get caught by the one they read about on Sunday and had forgotten by Wednesday.

Where this fits in a funded week

The calendar is one document among several that decide a funded week.

Your firm's rule set is another, because a news window is a single clause in a longer agreement that also carries loss limits and payout terms, and the two work against each other if you plan around one and ignore the other.

Then the account itself. The 2-Step Challenge is the lowest entry price of the three routes and the widest drawdown we publish, with account sizes from $7,500 to $180,000 and a fee that is 100% refundable.

Neither phase carries a time limit, so a week you choose to sit out around data does not put a deadline at risk.

* Program rules and pricing as published on the live program pages, 15 October 2026. Promotions change, so check the current terms before you buy.

Content on this page is general information only and is not investment advice. Every SFX Funded account is a simulated capital account. Trading involves risk, and past performance is not a guarantee of future results.