News Trading Rule
A firm restriction on holding or opening positions around high-impact economic releases — a small piece of discipline that protects your account and your payouts.
A news trading rule limits trading in a window around scheduled high-impact events — the monthly jobs report, CPI, FOMC decisions and press conferences. Typically the restriction is a blackout window before and after the release, sometimes just a couple of minutes on each side, sometimes longer, and it may apply to funded accounts more strictly than to evaluations.
The reason is spread and slippage, not spite. In the seconds around a major release, the order book thins dramatically. Your stop at 5,325.00 doesn’t fill at 5,325.00 — it fills wherever there’s a resting bid, which in a fast tape can be many ticks away. A position sized for a $200 risk can produce a much larger loss through no fault of your entry logic, and that loss lands on the firm’s capital as well as your drawdown.
What the rule usually specifies:
- Which events count — often a defined list of high-impact US releases.
- The blackout window — a set number of minutes before and after the print.
- Whether it’s a ban on entering, or a ban on holding through the window. These are very different: one lets you keep an existing position; the other requires you to be flat.
- Whether it applies to evaluations, funded accounts, or both.
Here’s the reframe that serves you: the traders who consistently get paid mostly want to be flat into a major print. Not because they’re timid, but because a coin-flip on a news spike has nothing to do with their edge, and a single bad fill can erase a week of patient work. Sitting out ten minutes a month is a rounding error on your opportunity; a stop filled far from your price is not.
Build the release calendar into your routine, know your firm’s window, and flatten before it. Master this and you’re ahead of most traders.
Read news trading rules for the full breakdown, then compare firm policies in our directory.