If you trade — or just hold anything denominated in dollars — you already know the drill: FOMC decisions, CPI prints, and NFP releases move markets in seconds, and the only warning you get is whatever tab you happened to leave open. This post walks through a small n8n workflow that polls an economic calendar every morning and pushes high-impact USD events straight to Telegram. Total build time: about 15 minutes. Total cost: $0 on free tiers.
The problem with checking ForexFactory manually
ForexFactory's calendar is the de facto standard for retail traders, but it's built for humans, not machines:
No official API. The calendar is rendered HTML with timezone handling done client-side. There's an unofficial weekly XML feed, but it's coarse, cached, and has broken without notice before.
Manual checking doesn't scale. You'll check it religiously for a week, then miss the one CPI print that mattered because it landed on a day you didn't look.
Scraping it yourself is annoying. The site uses Cloudflare, session-dependent timezone cookies, and markup that shifts often enough that a naive scraper needs regular babysitting.
You could pay for a commercial economic calendar API — most start around $30–100/month for the tier that includes forecast/previous values. That's overkill if all you want is "ping me when something big is scheduled today."
The actor
Disclosure up front: I built the actor used in this tutorial, so take the recommendation with that in mind.
— grab your API token from Settings → Integrations
Questions or broken edge cases, drop a comment — the actor is actively maintained and issue reports genuinely help.
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