Using the Economic Calendar

Resources is one page. It lists the economic releases that move futures and FX — the rate decisions, the inflation prints, the employment numbers — on the days and at the times they are scheduled to land. It is the only surface in Alltra that is not about your own trading, which has one useful consequence: the account picker in the navbar changes nothing here. Two traders looking at the same day see the same releases.

The four figures across the top

A strip of four, and they describe the range you are looking at rather than the market in general. Each carries a small comparison underneath.

• Total Events — how many releases fall inside your current date range, before any filter you have applied.
• High Impact Today — how many of them are high impact on the reference day — the last day of your range, or today if the range is open-ended.
• Currencies — how many distinct currencies are represented in the range. A quiet week for the dollar can still be a loud one for the pound.
• Next Major Event — the release time of the next high-impact event that has not printed yet, with a live countdown beside it.

The comparisons measure against the day before the end of your range, not against today. That is what stops a look back at last Tuesday from reading as a collapse — it compares Tuesday with Monday, which is the comparison you meant.

The countdown recomputes every thirty seconds and it floors rather than rounds, so it never claims more time than actually remains; once the release is due it reads “Now”. It also looks past the range you are viewing, so it can name a release the table below is not showing — and it says “None scheduled” with a dash when there is nothing ahead of it.

The table, and the order it is in

Releases are grouped by day, with the weekday and date running down the left of the table in a rail that sticks under the header as you scroll. Inside a day, timed releases come first in time order and all-day entries sit at the bottom; where two land in the same minute, the higher impact is listed first.

There is no column sorting, and that is deliberate rather than missing. Paging through a list whose order is not fully determined silently repeats some rows and skips others — which looks like missing data rather than a sorting problem, and is much harder to notice. A calendar has one natural order anyway, and this is it.

Cutting it down

Unfiltered, the calendar lists every release in the range — every economy, every tier — and most of it has nothing to do with what you trade. Five controls sit in the table’s toolbar.

• High impact only — the first button, and the one most people want. One press narrows to high impact, another press clears it.
• The date range — the calendar’s own range control. It opens on today, because this page is day-focused, and carries the usual presets from This Week through Year to date and All Time.
• Filters — Country, Currency, Impact and Session. Country and Currency are searchable lists; Impact and Session are rows of pills. They commit together on Apply filters.
• Columns — which of the twelve columns you want to see, with four presets.
• Search — for a named release you already have in mind.

The High impact button is not a second setting sitting beside the Impact filter — it is a view of that filter. Pressed means the impact filter is exactly High and nothing else, so the chip row and the popover’s own pills move with it. Tick Medium in the popover and the button un-presses itself, because you are no longer asking for high impact only.

Search matches the release name, the period it covers, the country code and the currency — and nothing else. Typing an impact tier or a session name into it finds nothing, because those are filters rather than text on the row. Terms are capped at 120 characters, which is the longest the search will accept.

What an applied filter looks like

Every filter in force appears as a removable chip in the toolbar beside the search box, with a count on the Filters button and a Clear all beside the chips. Past five chips the rest collapse into a +N tag. This matters more than it sounds: a filter you cannot see is the most common reason a calendar looks empty, and the chips are the page saying out loud what it is currently hiding.

Columns

Twelve columns in four groups — Event info, Release, Comparison and Meta. Three of them can never be switched off: Time, Event and Impact. That is the floor of when it lands, what it is, and how much it matters, and a table without those is a table of blank rows.

The presets are Default (all twelve), Minimal (time, event, impact and actual), All and None, and every one of them puts the three locked columns back. The three unpinned groups also collapse to a single primary column from their header, which is the quicker move when you want the space back temporarily rather than permanently.

Paging

Ten rows to a page by default, with 25 and 50 available in the footer beside the pager. The footer states the range it is actually showing — “Showing 1–10 of 42 events” — counted from the rows that came back rather than from where the pager has moved to.

Anything that changes what is being asked for — a filter, a date range, a search, a page size — returns you to page one. Left on page four, a narrower filter would land you past the end of the new result, and an empty page four is indistinguishable on screen from there being no such releases at all.

When the table is empty, it says which thing emptied it

There are four different messages rather than one, because they call for four different actions: no releases scheduled in this date range (widen it), none matching your filters (clear them), none matching your search term (fix it), and none matching the term with those filters together. A single flat “No events” under a search box full of text and four armed facets tells you nothing you can act on.

Working it into a session

1. 1Set it once and leave it — your currency, and high impact. For most traders that leaves a handful of releases a week instead of the whole calendar, and it is a setup you never have to think about again.
2. 2Read it before the session, not during — the entire value of a scheduled release is that it is scheduled. Finding out about it at the moment it prints is the same as not having known.
3. 3Read it back afterwards — a day that went wrong at 8:30 and a day that went wrong because of you are different problems with different fixes, and this is the page that tells them apart.