News trading restrictions

The shape of the rule

Very few firms prohibit trading during news outright. The typical published rule is a blackout window around scheduled high-impact releases, during which you may not execute on affected instruments.

Three parameters define it, and all three are published where the rule exists at all: the width of the window, what counts as execution, and which events are in scope.

"Execution" usually includes your stop

This is the part that catches people. Most firms define execution to include any order that fills during the window — a manual close, a pending order, a stop-loss and a take-profit.

The practical consequence is uncomfortable: a position opened well before the release, protected by a stop, becomes a rule problem if the release moves the market and the stop fills inside the window. You did not act; the market did. Several firms state explicitly that this counts.

Some firms therefore require positions to be flat before the window opens rather than merely untouched. Where they do, that is the stricter rule and the one to plan around.

Which events count

Firms publish a list rather than a definition. Common entries include central bank rate decisions and statements, inflation prints, employment reports and GDP releases, plus instrument-specific items such as energy inventories for oil and agricultural reports for grains.

Scope is usually by instrument, not by account. A release affecting one currency restricts pairs containing that currency and the indices priced in it; unrelated instruments trade normally. Where a firm publishes a table of currency-to-event mappings, that table is the rule and is worth keeping open while you trade.

Firms almost always point at a specific economic calendar as the authority for timing. Using a different calendar is not a defence if the times differ.

What a breach does

The published consequences vary more than the rules themselves, and they are proportionate more often than people expect.

• Profit reversal — the profit from the offending trade is removed from the account, and everything else stands. This is the most common consequence.
• Trade voided — the trade is treated as though it never happened, which can also affect a consistency calculation.
• Warning — a first breach is recorded and explained, with escalation on repetition.
• Account termination — reserved by most firms for deliberate or repeated exploitation rather than an incidental fill.

Read the consequence alongside the rule. A plan with a wide window and profit reversal is less severe in practice than a narrow window with termination.

Evaluation and funded phases often differ

It is common for news trading to be unrestricted during an evaluation and restricted once the account is funded, because the firm's exposure changes at that point.

One firm in the current record publishes exactly this split: news trading is freely allowed on its one-step and two-step challenge accounts, while its funded and direct-model accounts restrict execution around high-impact releases. If you read only the challenge page, you would not know the funded stage differs.

Rex records conduct rules per account variant, with the page they were read from, so a plan whose evaluation and funded rules differ shows the value that was actually published for that variant.

Checking a plan

1. 01Find the windowHow many minutes before and after, and whether it is symmetric.
2. 02Check whether stop and take-profit fills countIf they do, plan to be flat rather than merely inactive.
3. 03Find the event list and the calendarThe firm's nominated calendar is the authority for timing.
4. 04Check the funded-account rules separatelyThey frequently differ from the evaluation rules and live in a different document.
5. 05Find the consequenceProfit reversal, void, warning or termination.

Rex shows news trading as allowed, restricted with its condition, or prohibited on every challenge page, and marks it not collected where no page has been read for that plan.