News Filter in Backtest & Live Trading

Stop violating prop firm rules and risking your profits on high-impact news events with our News Filter block.

Why Your Trading Bot Needs a News Filter 

A News Filter gives your automated strategy awareness of scheduled economic events. You can choose if you want to continue trading through these events, stop trading, or even close your trades before these events hit. A News Filter gives you full control over how to deal with high-impact news events in your trading. This is incredibly powerful and especially useful if you are trading with prop firms that have strict rules against trading around high-impact news events.

The news filter block offers several advantages:

• Automatic currency detection. The News Filter reads the symbol your EA is trading and automatically determines which currencies are involved — for example, EURUSD maps to EUR and USD. It then only reacts to news events that belong to those currencies. You don't have to configure any of this by hand.
• High-impact events only. The filter focuses on the events that actually move the market, ignoring low-impact noise.
• Works live and in backtests. The same filter runs in real trading and in historical testing, so your backtests reflect how the filter behaves.
• Protect your Prop Firm Funded accounts. Many prop firms don’t allow the opening and closing of trades within a certain window around news. Never risk violating this rule anymore with the Profectus News Filter. 
• You stay in control. The filter only reports whether news is near — you decide, in your own strategy flow, what should happen. 

How the News Filter Block Works

Instead of trading blindly during high-impact news, your EA can check for upcoming important news and decide what to do. To simplify the mechanics of the News Filter block, you can imagine it’s asking the following question:

“Are we currently outside a high-impact news event window?”

If yes, it’s safe to continue the logic of your EA and perhaps open a trade. If the answer is no, and the current time is inside of a high-impact news event window, the EA will not continue until the window has passed.

In the Block, you can set how big you want the time window to be. If you want to activate the News Filter 15 minutes before the news event, for example, not to open any news trades within 15 minutes of news, you put 15 in the Minutes Before field.
If you want to let the market cool down for 2 minutes after a news event before continuing trading, you can also put 2 in the Minutes After field. 

How to Use the News Filter Block in Profectus

The News Filter Block operates like any other Block in Profectus and has a true and false output to connect to the next block. 

• True — fires when the current time falls outside any news event window. It's safe to take a trade, so you'd typically connect this output to a trade execution block.

• False — fires when the current time falls inside a news event window. You can use this to close any open trades before the actual news hits.

In the block itself, you can set the time window around news events (minutes before and minutes after), and you can actually select which events you want to filter. By default, all high-impact news events are selected for filtering.

The Block automatically detects which currencies are being traded and thus, which news events are relevant for those currencies. If you run a bot with a News Filter block on EUR/USD, it will automatically detect the news events for the EUR and for the USD. If you run it on XAU/USD, it will automatically detect the news events for the USD.

In the example above, you can see how you can use the True and False outputs of the News Filter block. In the left-side example, the News Filter block is used before the Buy Now block to stop opening trades during a High-Impact news event window. In the right-side example, the News Filter block is used before a Close Trades Block to close any open trades before a High-Impact news event window. We use the False output of the News Filter block to basically say: We are now in a news event window, what do we do next?. In this case, it’s closing all open trades to protect ourselves from unwanted spikes. 

Use cases for the News Filter block: 

• Don’t open new trades around High-Impact news events. The most obvious example is not to trade around news. This will be the biggest advantage to protect yourself from unwanted trades and to protect yourself from violating Prop Firm rules. Also, you can set the window before and after the news event
• Close trades before high-impact news events. A safety feature to use if you don’t want to expose your trades to the volatility caused by the news. Also, great for staying within Prop Firm rules, as they often don’t allow the closing of trades within a certain window of time around High-Impact news 
• Remove open orders before high-impact news events. The same idea as not opening news trades. If you have pending orders open, you can avoid getting spiked in by news volatility if you remove them before the news hits
• Trade during high-impact news events. You might want to actually open trades only on news events to take advantage of spikes and volatility. You can also use the News Filter block for this purpose

Backtesting with the News Filter

We are actually very proud to say that Profectus is the only EA builder that you can also use the News Filter in your backtests. The News Filter works in backtests as well as in live trading, so you can measure its impact on historical data. When you run a backtest with the News Filter block, Profectus AI can detect historical news events dating back to January 2015.

This means your backtest reflects how the filter would have blocked entries or closed trades around real past events, giving you a realistic picture of its effect on your results before you go live. Your window settings and selected events apply in the same way during a backtest as they do in live trading.

For more details on how to use the News Filter block in Profectus AI, read this article in our Help Center.

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