August 27th, 2009
A big change is being made to the News section today! All stories will now be provided by members of the Factory News Network (FNN), a team of familiar faces we’ve organized to bring you the most timely, insightful, and interesting Forex news in the world. 
FNN members will provide a blend of stories from around the web and personally authored stories – all catered to Forex traders. The founding members of FNN include:
caseystubbs | Representing Winners Edge Trading
James Chen | Representing FX Solutions
ForexDatasource | ForexDatasource.com
Learning Markets | Learning Markets
Mohammed Isah | Representing FXTechstrategy
TheLFB.com | TheLFB
Trout | Representing Trading University
Yohay | Representing Forex Crunch
If you’re a professional analyst or trader interesting to become an FNN member, please submit an application here!
The introduction of FNN marks the end of Forex Factory’s wide-open story submission format. After a long wrestle with the model we don’t feel it can produce the level of quality and value that we expect from our products. As a coordinated team of analysts and traders, FNN has the skills to deliver the consistent and reliable news that’s been lacking in the open format. And once the team establishes their rhythm and we make some key interface changes in the coming weeks…let’s just say we are advising all members to get long FF News. 
Fyi, Forex Factory will still accept story suggestions from all members and companies, with FNN managing which suggestions actually get posted. The functionality for story suggestions is still under construction; we hope to have it launched in September!
As always, we welcome your feedback!
Posted by Sidney, Forex Factory Director of Marketing
Posted in General Updates | No Comments »
July 28th, 2009
After a substantial development period we’re proud to unveil Broker Quotes, the world’s first multi-source Forex quotes! You can check out the live version in the left column of the News page.
Broker Quotes is small in size but big on functionality. It supports 27 currency pairs quoted in real-time by any combination of eleven brokers. The gadget is fully customizable and remembers your settings with cookies. The details of Broker Quotes operation and design are covered in the user guide, which is a required reading if you want to get the most out of the gadget.
We’ll be testing Broker Quotes on the News page until we feel it’s stable enough to move to it’s permanent residence on the homepage. The gadget has an intricate back-end that is yet to be load tested, so there may be a few crashes and bugs during the beta period (disclaimer! ).
If you encounter a bug or have an idea for improvement make sure to comment or contact us!
Posted by Scot, Forex Factory Senior Developer
Posted in General Updates | 8 Comments »
July 14th, 2009
Today we launch our coverage of key Chinese economic data. The following events will now be reported on the Forex Factory calendar:
- GDP q/y
- Industrial Production y/y
- Trade Balance
- Manufacturing PMI
- CLSA Manufacturing PMI
- CPI y/y
- PPI y/y
- Fixed Asset Investment ytd/y
- More Coming Soon
As you may have noticed, Chinese data releases are gradually having a more pronounced impact on the currency markets. Presently their influence can rival high-profile G7 indicators, especially in regard to the yen and commodity currencies. It has long been evident that we needed to add the Chinese yuan (CNY) to the calendar, and early this year the Forex Factory economists set out to tackle the project.
The sources for Chinese data are far less transparent and less reliable than we are used to dealing with on the calendar, which is why we had avoided CNY for so long. It took our team five months of research, source gathering, release monitoring, and beta-testing to report the data with the same quality and reliability that we strive for on the calendar.
We cannot change how Chinese sources release and schedule data, but we can implement procedures that will bring clarity and consistency to our coverage. We have made several ‘FF Notes’ (see the Detail View by clicking the 
icon) to inform you of special circumstances you might expect to see, and we created a new set of ‘FF Alerts’ (see the 
inside the Detail View, where applicable) that will be used keep you abreast of scheduling issues as they happen. For the least reliable release schedules we opted to set the event’s default time to ‘Tentative’ to make you aware that we don’t know the exact release time. With all CNY data you should be prepared to see surprise early releases, leaked data later retracted, and data being delayed for days – we will do our best to inform you of these issues with the FF Alert function. Finally, we ask that you be slightly more forgiving of our mistakes as we become further acquainted with the new coverage.
We will report our first live CNY data in about 24 hours… see you there!
Posted by Tim, Forex Factory Senior Economist
Posted in Calendar Updates | 6 Comments »
July 10th, 2009
In response to numerous member requests, we built a new feature that lets you dynamically bookmark four thread locations – the first page, first unread post, last page, or last post.
These bookmarks are especially useful if you follow the high-activity threads in the Interactive Trading forum, as you can now access the latest thread updates with one click of your bookmark.
Thanks to the members who suggested this feature!
Posted by Sidney, Forex Factory Director of Marketing
Posted in General Updates | 3 Comments »
June 30th, 2009
We finally made it to Facebook! We welcome you to visit the official Forex Factory Facebook page and hope you’ll “Become a Fan” if you’re a Facebook member.
To kick things off we built an automatic Wall stream that pulls the most active new threads and the top-voted stories on a daily basis. Let us know if you find it useful! What else should we add to our Facebook page?
Posted by Sidney, Forex Factory Director of Marketing
Posted in General Updates | 2 Comments »
May 22nd, 2009
We whipped up an interface to monitor the activity on the Trader Sentiment feature launched on Tuesday. It was only supposed to be used for internal purposes but I thought it was so cool that I convinced the team to let me put it on the blog.
Have a look: http://www.forexfactory.com/sentiment.php
Posted by Sidney, Forex Factory Director of Marketing
Posted in General Updates | 14 Comments »
May 19th, 2009
Are you bullish on the euro? How about the yen? If you were sharing your opinion with our new Trader Sentiment feature, I’d already know!
Launched today in beta form, Trader Sentiment lets you broadcast your opinion on currencies, commodities, stocks, and interest rates – right on your FF profile!
It’s pretty simple – you share your sentiment through an interface in your Control Panel, which then shows up on your public profile. Now anyone can see your detailed market outlook at any given time.
At this point Trader Sentiment is just a neat feature, but it can become a super useful tool if lots of traders use it regularly. For starters, we could mine the community data to show aggregate sentiment in truly useful and groundbreaking ways. We could also create alerts for sudden sentiment changes, show community and individual sentiment history, let you subscribe to another member’s sentiment, or even view your friend’s aggregate sentiment.
So try it out, then comment or contact us to share your thoughts and observations. We’ll be monitoring the feedback and usage, and if it starts catching on we’ll get to work on the upgrades!
Posted by Sidney, Forex Factory Director of Marketing
Posted in General Updates | 7 Comments »
May 18th, 2009
Around 9:00am EDT this morning Forex Factory came under DDoS attack, which brought the site down for about three hours and caused intermittent outages throughout the afternoon. We’re using all available resources to defend against the attack, and pulling in additional resources as I type. At the moment the site is operating normally, but these kinds of attacks tend to be fluid and there’s no telling what will happen over the next 48 hours.
The attack actually began Friday evening, but until this morning we were able to fend it off with limited interruption to the website. The defense we used on Friday blocked some legitimate traffic so you might have had trouble accessing the site over the weekend. You may be blocked again as we defend against further attacks, but rest assured the block will be temporary.
We appreciate your patience and understanding. Wish us luck!
Posted by Jeff, Forex Factory Network Engineer
Posted in General Updates | 19 Comments »
May 1st, 2009
As promised in a blog post last week, we’ve launched a new feature that allows you to see any member’s News voting history. Just click the vote count link on their profile.
We designed this feature so you can follow the stories that a respected trader found useful, but we’re sure you’ll find your own ways to use it!
Let us know if you have any feedback!
Posted by Sidney, Forex Factory Director of Marketing
Posted in News Section Updates | 4 Comments »
April 26th, 2009
This weekend we performed a major upgrade to FF’s codebase and I’m happy to report that things went according to plan (phew!). You won’t notice most of the changes because the main purpose of the upgrade was to lay the groundwork we’ll use to deliver advanced features and applications in the future.
The few front-end modifications that you’ll notice include:
Large image attachments are now displayed via Lightbox technology (click on any post’s chart thumbnail to see it in action).
Your member profile now has privacy options.
Your Buddy List and Ignore List are now on two different pages, and have a slightly altered layout.
Member profile comments have a new look and utilize Ajax.
Given this upgrade was a radical change to FF’s source we expect to be finding and fixing bugs for the next week. If you notice anything acting funny please comment or contact us.
Posted by Scot, Forex Factory Senior Developer
Posted in General Updates | 4 Comments »