The Forex Factory Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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

We just launched a cool gadget that gives you at-a-glance central bank rate information. Before you start thinking “Oh no…not another list of interest rates!,” at least take it for a spin! You can find the gadget at the bottom-left of the News page (its beta residence).

Gadget features include: Updated in real-time Fully automated Rate relativity bars Links to last and next releases Links to 9-year rate charts Links to central bank websites

Do you guys have any ideas on how we can make this gadget better? On what pages would you like to see it? We appreciate all your comments!

Posted by Sidney, Forex Factory Director of Marketing

We’ve been working hard on a major new initiative – Forex Factory Web Syndication. It’s a collection of Forex data tools that webmasters can install on their website or blog. We hope to have the first phase of Web Syndication rolled out in April, and we’re currently in need of some beta testers to give us feedback before launch.

If you’re a webmaster and interested in participating in the beta test, please get in touch with me by submitting a contact form with the subject ‘Syndication Beta Test’. Please specify the URL where you’ll be installing the tools. Your help will be very much appreciated!

See you again in a few weeks for Web Syndication’s public launch!

Posted by Michael, Forex Factory Syndication Manager