I don't... I keep myself in a box and never pay attention to any news in the least. I just note where it is on my calendar and the time. News can catalyze big moves but the direction of those moves is determined by the technicals 90%+ of the time, not the news itself. The only news I care about is fed/fomc and black swan events. Listening to news distracts me from my technicals and brings my win rate down in my experience. LoL... After the day is over I do glance around at some headlines. Or if there is a sudden weird surge volume that doesn't make technical sense I will check the headlines just in case something big is going down. Most all the day to day crap about home sales, oil reports, and consumer stuff just serves as a emotional catalyst to keep the trading good IMO.
Unexpected country downgrade's, japanese tsunami's, and etc... They can trigger multi-day trends and changes in market behavior and are important to note. Countries and governments are usually intelligent enough to announce that kinda crap after futures close on Friday, during a long holiday weekend, or a scheduled FOMC meeting...
The title of the thread was a question. I am just stating my opinion and experiences afterward to show my current point of view. Do you agree/disagree? Do you trade the eminis and keep any news feeds up? A year ago I use to keep up a news feed and my heart would skip a beat every time a red key news event flashed up. But then I finally realized that was retarded. In order to eliminate the bad habit of news effecting my trading decisions negatively I simply eliminated the news and just watch charts and L2.
Time of the news, yes, as warning of potential rise in volatility for price pinning and/or tech damage, actual news information, don't care.
Your message post is very confusing. First you say you "don't pay attention to news" and then you go on to say you note on your calendar their times. Next you go on to say the news you do pay attention to are the ones that involves FED/FOMC events. Why didn't you just say you DO pay attention to SOME news events. In my trading, I pay attention to most schedule key market events because that's when swing points, strong continuations, profit targets, trade management areas and other useful trading information tends to occurs. These key market events often creates key changes in supply/demand that can be used along with other key changes in supply/demand that were generated via technical reasons alone without key market events. I just want them to generate volatility and don't really care too much about the "content" of the key market event unless it's really big (e.g. financial crisis in 2008)... My trading suffers if I 100% ignore key market events.
The only thing that matters, and the only thing that is driving this market is if the FED continues to pump liquidity or not pump liquidity. Earnings? Maybe Apple, otherwise earnings don't mean shit. Philly Fed doesn't do shit other than move things for 5 minutes. Monthly employment figures? Who cares? The only thing to watch is "Control P". That is all that matters. Three years and 8.5 trillion in global liquidity pumping later, is the reason this stupid market with no volume is where it's at. As long as the beard keeps hitting control P this thing will rise forever. Until is doesn't.
Most of the news is noise. But here's just one good example of why I listen...... On CNBC they interrupted with a news flash for the Greece default. Not unexpected ..... but a quick click on the sell short was good for about 20 ticks over 10 min.