Economic Event Reactions: What Actually Happened

What these pages actually show

Most economic calendars tell you what is scheduled and how much impact to expect. Neither answers the question a trader actually has: when this release printed last time, what did price do? Every page in this section answers that from recorded intraday prices. For each tracked event we take the primary FX pair's five-minute candles around the scheduled release, measure where price sat five, fifteen and sixty minutes later, and label the direction. Nothing here is a forecast, a backtest or a model output. It is a record of what already happened, release by release, so you can judge the size of a typical reaction yourself instead of taking a volatility rating on trust.

How to read the numbers

Two columns on the table above carry most of the signal.

Average pip move at sixty minutes is the mean absolute distance price travelled from its pre-release level within the first hour. It is absolute, so a sharp drop and a sharp rally both count as a large move. Releases tracked tells you how many observations that average rests on, and it matters as much as the average itself: a mean over three releases is a far weaker claim than one over ten, and the count is shown precisely so you can discount it accordingly. Each event page then adds the five- and fifteen-minute checkpoints and a direction label for every individual release, which is where the useful detail sits. The same event can move a pair sixty pips one quarter and eight the next.

Why the average is the least useful number

An average is a summary of a distribution, and for scheduled macro releases that distribution is wide. Two events with identical averages can have completely different shapes: one where every print produced a similar drift, and one where nine were quiet and the tenth gapped. Reading the individual release rows tells you which you are looking at. It is also worth stating plainly that direction is not predictable from this data. Knowing that a rate decision typically moves a pair thirty pips tells you nothing about which way the next one goes, and no quantity of historical reaction data changes that.

Why this matters more on an evaluation

On a personal account an outsized move against you costs money. On an evaluation it can also cost the account, because daily-loss and maximum-drawdown limits are hard thresholds rather than something you trade your way out of. FundedFast challenges run a 5% maximum daily loss and a 10% maximum drawdown, so a position sized for an ordinary session can breach a limit during a release that travels three or four times its usual range. Knowing the historical spread of an event lets you size against the realistic tail instead of the calm case. Rules on trading around scheduled releases differ between firms and can change, so check the current FundedFast Terms and Conditions rather than assuming, and check any competing firm's own policy before paying for an evaluation.

Where the numbers come from

Release times and consensus figures come from EODHD's economic events API, which records each report to the minute in UTC. Intraday prices come from the same provider's market-data API, matched to the candle closest to that timestamp so the pre-release baseline is the price the market was actually trading when the number hit the wire. The measurement window runs from thirty minutes before the scheduled time to sixty-five minutes after: wide enough to capture a clean baseline and the whole first hour of reaction, narrow enough that unrelated intraday drift does not dilute it. Each event page lists its own external sources so you can check a print against the issuing authority directly.

What this data cannot tell you

Three limits are worth stating outright. The sample is short: most events carry fewer than a dozen recorded releases, which is enough to size a range and not enough to support a statistical claim. The measurement is single-pair, so an event that moves the dollar broadly will look different on a cross these pages do not track. And spreads widen sharply around releases, so the distances shown are mid-price movements rather than the fill you would have achieved. Treat these numbers as a scale reference, not as a tradeable edge.