The news rule generates more support tickets than any other — almost always from traders who understood half of it. Here is the whole of it.
The rule
No open positions from 5 minutes before to 5 minutes after a high-impact economic event. Two details carry all the weight:
- Held positions count. A position opened hours earlier and carried into the window breaches exactly like one opened inside it. The rule is about exposure during the event, not about the click that created it.
- Every instrument counts — including crypto. A US CPI release moves Bitcoin within seconds. Macro events reprice everything priced in the currency they touch, so the window applies to your BTC position, your gold position and your EUR/USD position equally.
What counts as high-impact
The restricted calendar is published in your portal — central-bank rate decisions, CPI and PPI prints, US employment data, GDP releases and similar. If an event is not on the portal calendar, it is not restricted. The portal is the single source of truth, not third-party calendars, whose impact ratings often differ.
How to trade around it cleanly
- Check the calendar at the start of your session, not mid-trade. Two minutes of reading removes the entire class of breach.
- Flatten early. If a restricted event lands at 12:30 UTC, be flat by 12:20 rather than 12:24. Spreads widen into events; the exit you planned at four minutes out fills worse than the one at ten.
- Re-enter after +5:00, not at +4:55. The window has hard edges and the engine enforces them to the second.
- Holding through the weekend is fine — the news rule is about scheduled event windows, not market closures. Sunday gaps count toward drawdown like any other move, but they are not a news breach.
Why the rule exists at all
Event spikes are the one market condition where a simulated fill and a real-market fill genuinely diverge — the moment when slippage, gaps and frozen liquidity make simulated profits unearnable in live conditions. A funded account is a claim that your edge survives real markets; the window removes the five minutes where that claim cannot be tested honestly.
Trade the reaction, not the release. The move that matters is still there ten minutes later — with your account still attached to it.