Economic Events are the pulse of financial experience engagement

Economic events are an engagement goldmine if you can automate customer engagement in their pre, post and live release lifecycle.

Providing timely information on economic events is incredibly important for retail trading customers. It can maximize the potential of the cycle of economic activity to increase engagement and to educate your customers.

Economic events happen at least once a week. In the busiest periods of the year, they take place daily.

Important events can be news and data releases on interest rate decisions or big economic data like GDP updates or retail sales and job figures.

These events take place in countries across the globe, having huge impacts on price and risk across most markets. They’re often scheduled and represent a clear opportunity to trade for most retail traders across a range of asset classes, but particularly in FX.

Retail traders rely heavily on economic events for their research ahead of trading. It’s common for them to review the economic events calendar every morning. They also benefit from reviewing earnings calendars with similar price movements on data and news releases for publicly listed companies.

A good financial experience platform needs to curate content from any sources that specifically relate to an economic event or earnings release. This means teams can leverage the cycles of these events to improve information, education, and engagement of these important market moving events.

Typically, economic and earnings calendars contain a very wide range of events, colour coded for importance and risk of moving price. These calendars require the customer to research and discover what is important to understand how they want to trade on the event.

Important Economic Events

• U.S. Non-Farm Payrolls (NFP)

• U.S. Federal Interest Rates

• US Federal Funds Rate

• Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

• Consumer Confidence Index

• Consumer Price Index (CPI)

• Purchasing Managers Index (PMI)

• Industrial Production Index (IPI)

• Retail Sales Data

• Rate of Inflation

Economic events engagement should be a key growth strategy as with the correct education and engagement they provide key opportunities to increase market participation and also increase trader knowledge - if you can master how to trade a data release you can manage most opportunities and risks the market presents.

Proximity algorithms (measures how close to an event something is) should be used to automate the engagement phase of an economic event and begin to introduce curated or generated content about the event into the financial experience of each user.

Each economic event needs to be it own entity so the NLP/NER running a part of the financial experience platform can curate all related information. Jut like an instrument, an eco event should be a item in each users entity preference and recommendation list. This is critical for targeting the engagement at those who have a measurable interest.

Any economic event financial experience should include the following phases:

Post Event (1-24 hour after data release)

Analyse economic data and relate it to opportunities for trading. Be sure to analyse the data from the behaviour verticals and how they differed from the actual, for example the market anticipated x for non farm payroll and it was a mi to the upside. I talk about these verticals in more detail in this article, financial experience behaviour verticals.

This delta or difference from what is expected, what the data says and what actually happens is the edge a good trader is looking for so build this capability up and it should be automated in the financial experience platform.

Pre Event (1 week before data release)

Begin to engage with users who are interested in this economic event of instruments by doing the following:

• Describe the event and the instruments it impacts

• Provide some behaviour data such a related trading volume from user cohort (critical for FOMO)

• Best trades from last month release (critical for FOMO & education)

• Education - exactly how to trade the economic event

• Analysis - if possible provide your in hue analysis along side the data

Economic Event Live (2 days before release)

Create a destination which has the live curation and generation of economic events data available in one place. This could be a feed or a web/app page - build it once and re-use it with the latest content populating it.

This asset will give you an anchor for increasing engagement in the event itself. If you build it they will come - drive traffic to it relentlessly, this will also help refine customer preferences towards the event and impacted instruments. The asset should contain all curated and generative content, analytics for behaviour vertical data and live data updates and CTA for watching trades like community or forum.

Quick recap:

• Economic events aren’t leveraged properly and are a gold mine for cyclical engagement

• Everything should be automated - your financial experience platform just need to know when and what the event i to curate an experience for your customers

• Create a destination for each economic event that can be used per cycle

• Ensure the economic event is tagged correctly in the financial experience platform to ensure all content is curated and generated accurately

• Always target users rather than run a wide campaign

• Educate your users how to trade the economic event in detail

• Always provide behaviour vertical data comparing pre and post release to increase trust in outcome and increase fear of missing out

• Create economic event specific KPI in order to assess how your event strategy is working - eg pre/live/post engagement + trading volumes linked to event.

When building a financial experience every single market event, particularly cyclical, is an opportunity to automate and optimise engagement with the customer. The market event creates the tension and the opportunity - you don't need to create one off, big event campaigns, every single data release should run and engage with those who are interested without sales and marketing effort. Work smarter not harder!

Cheers

Adam