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The news-blackout rule is the single most common cause of unforced disqualification. Operators don’t intend to trade news; they have an unrelated position open when CPI prints; the rule fires; the account is gone.

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Rule shape across firms

FTMO is the only firm in the supported set that explicitly permits holding through high-impact news. Even FTMO applies a “dominant source” review at payout — strategies whose dominant profit source is news entries can be disqualified.

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What counts as “high-impact”

The de facto standard across firms is the Forex Factory red-folder classification:
  • Tier 1 (always counted): NFP, CPI, FOMC, ECB rate decisions, BoE rate decisions, GDP, unemployment claims (when treated as primary).
  • Tier 2 (variable): PMI manufacturing, retail sales, durable goods, unemployment claims (when secondary).
  • Tier 3 (rarely counted): housing starts, building permits, consumer confidence.
Some firms publish a calendar; most defer to Forex Factory’s red-folder definition.

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Implementation: how Glitch Executor enforces it

The Strategy IR includes a schedule.newsLockoutMinutes parameter (default 5). When compiled to cBot or EA, the generated code:
  1. Fetches the Forex Factory calendar at strategy start + once per trading day.
  2. Filters for red-folder events in the next 24h.
  3. Blocks new entries within ±N minutes of any matched event.
  4. Flattens open positions that would be holding through the window, T minus N minutes before the release.
  5. Re-opens trading T plus N minutes after.
The default 5-minute buffer covers all six firms safely (strict letter is ±2; the buffer accommodates calendar drift, slow position-close on fast moves, and the rare event-moved-by-60-seconds case).

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Affected currency, not affected pair

Most firms’ news rules apply to the currency of the event, not the pair. A USD CPI release affects EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY — every pair containing USD. It does not affect EURGBP. The Glitch Executor IR supports per-currency filtering: a strategy on EURGBP can stay active during USD CPI but flatten during ECB. The conservative default flattens everything during top-tier events (NFP, FOMC, CPI) and uses per-currency filtering for tier-2.

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Calendar source reliability

A news-aware EA depends on the calendar source. Failure modes:
  • Calendar API down at release time — the EA defaults to “no filter” and the operator is exposed.
  • Holiday-shifted events — events that move (Bank of Japan announcements, in particular) may not be in the cached calendar.
  • Tier-shift — Forex Factory occasionally re-classifies an event between yellow and red; cached calendars miss the change.
Mitigation: refresh the calendar daily, not weekly. The Glitch Executor IR refreshes at strategy start + at 00:00 UTC every day.

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What this rule is NOT solving

It’s not solving “I want to trade news intentionally.” That use case requires FTMO Phase 1 specifically (the only firm that permits it) plus careful attention to the “dominant source” payout review. See the blog post News-lockout EAs: the firms that ban them and the workarounds that hold up. See related: EA / cBot policy, Firm Mode overview, strategies.