Many investors think that it in order to make money you must be fully invested in the financial markets all of the time.
The truth is that there are several regularly occurring events that happen each month and quarter that provide excellent trading opportunities.
They are so regular that you can literally find them on a calendar.
What are these events? Well each week, month, quarter, and year the government and other regulatory bodies and organizations release data that is eagerly anticipated by market participants.
Efficient market theory aside these events do provide regular trading opportunities.
There are scores of economists and strategists on Wall Street that try and guess what the numbers are going to be for things such as the consumer price index, non farm payrolls, unemployment, purchasing managers index, capacity utilization, and a whole list of other events.
While these strategists and economists are smart and have a lot of computer power to help them the fact remains that they don't always get their estimates right.
When the consensus is wrong the market typically moves very quickly in the unanticipated direction and with proper risk control you can reliably profit from these events.
What throws most traders off is that they don't trade enough different events and they don't use proper risk control and therefore get discouraged when they have a few trades go against them.
Instead what you must do is take all the historical data for both the economic data set as well as the trading instrument and backtest it across several years and see how it typically reacts to different outcomes.
By doing this you will gain a better understanding of how to best trade each announcement.
Global macro traders have along used this knowledge to profit from events in the United States as well as overseas in several different countries that provide sufficient economic data from which to construct trades.
This can be a very powerful and consistent trading strategy so hit your spreadsheets and study and profit from it all.