Forex news plays a major role for fundamental traders. It is the backbone of their forex trading system. As such, all eyes are on any bit of news that may affect a currency pair. News scalpers lead very exciting lives by attempting to predict the direction of a currency pair right before an important bit of forex news is released. It is very risky and more often than not, the trader gets burned. 
Since the resulting spike that comes after a forex news release can vary anywhere from 20 to a hundred pips, huge profits and losses can occur during this period. Forget your stop-loss. If the spike is particularly violent, your stop loss will not activate in time, incurring even further losses.
And we haven't even got to the spread yet. All brokers increase their spreads during major forex news release. The spread increase varies between 10 to 40 pips. Generally, the more important the forex news being released, the larger the spread. The kind of forex news that normally force forex brokers to increase their spreads are interest rate changes and all major economic news such as the unemployment rate, retail sales and the core consumer price index. There are a number of popular websites that provide provide detailed weekly forex news release schedules as well as elaborating on the important of said forex news. They include, Forex Factory, Dailyfx and fxstreet. These three make up the most popular websites for forex news. The Forex factory also serves as a popular hub for forex trading discussion via their forum.
