Mark Douglas wrote a book called Trading in the Zone.
The Zone is a vague description of where or how a person can get a sense of what may lie up ahead, it’s not an easy thing to describe but you do get a sense of this by reading and understanding current events - most often via ‘news’.
Let’s say in normal times you are trading GBP and the Retail Sales numbers for UK are going to be released the following morning at perhaps 09.30.
You know that these numbers will impact on price if they are healthy (better than expected) because maybe news of late could have been negative and perhaps talk of rates cuts.
Your reasoning would be that a jump in sales would ease pressure for the CB to cut etc etc.
Two ways to trade this - first is to just wait and see what happens price or you could head over to the British Retail Consortium site and see what numbers they have reported for the same month (they always are a week ahead of the market).
Just one example 
Here is me posting info about risk at the end of Jan