Spread and News Sentinel

Monitor the conditions around your trading, not just the price.

Spread & News Sentinel is a MetaTrader 5 monitoring indicator designed to give traders a clear view of three important parts of their trading environment:

Spread conditions, economic news and realized account performance.

Instead of generating buy or sell signals, Sentinel focuses on the conditions surrounding your trades. It monitors the live spread on the attached symbol, records a rolling spread history, keeps upcoming economic events visible on the chart and provides a visual overview of your current month's realized trading performance.

Everything is combined into a compact interactive dashboard with expandable Spread, News Events and Performance panels.

Key Features

• Live spread monitoring on the attached symbol
• User-defined Maximum Spread level
• Fixed 45-minute spread history
• Spread sampled every 5 seconds
• Fixed spread graph scale from zero to the selected maximum
• Clear spread-limit warnings
• Integrated Economic News Monitor
• Native MetaTrader 5 Economic Calendar support
• Alternative external economic news source
• News-source selection directly from the dashboard
• High, Medium and Low impact event filtering
• Configurable time windows before and after economic events
• Currency-aware news filtering
• Upcoming event countdowns
• Monthly Realized Performance graph
• Realized profit including profit, swap and commission
• Current-month completed trade count
• Account-wide performance monitoring
• Visual trigger warnings
• Optional audible alerts
• Interactive on-chart dashboard
• Expandable News Events panel
• Expandable Spread graph
• Expandable Performance graph
• Designed to work across Forex, metals, indices, crypto and other MT5 symbols

Fixed Spread Monitoring

Spread can change significantly throughout the trading day.

Session changes, reduced liquidity, economic news and broker conditions can all cause execution costs to increase.

Spread & News Sentinel continuously monitors the actual spread of the symbol it is attached to and compares it with the Maximum Spread selected by the user.

There is no adaptive or automatically changing threshold.

You decide what spread is acceptable for the symbol and broker you are using.

This makes the system easy to understand:

Current Spread below Maximum Spread = normal monitoring condition

Current Spread above Maximum Spread = spread limit exceeded

Because brokers and instruments use different point values, the Maximum Spread setting is entered in MT5 broker points.

45-Minute Spread History

The expandable Spread panel provides a rolling view of the previous 45 minutes of spread activity.

Spread is sampled every 5 seconds, allowing short-lived spikes as well as longer periods of elevated spread to become visible.

Unlike automatically scaling graphs, the vertical scale remains fixed between:

0 and your selected Maximum Spread

This makes changes in spread visually meaningful because the graph does not continuously resize itself as market conditions change.

You can quickly identify:

• Sudden spread spikes
• Extended periods of expensive spread
• Session transitions
• Thin-liquidity conditions
• News-related expansion
• Broker-specific spread behaviour
• Periods where your selected spread limit is exceeded

The graph also displays the current spread together with the selected maximum so the relationship between the two remains clear.

Monthly Realized Performance

Sentinel now includes a dedicated Monthly Realized Performance graph.

The graph reads the actual MetaTrader 5 account history and displays cumulative realized trading performance from the beginning of the current calendar month through the current day.

Realized performance includes:

Trade Profit + Swap + Commission

This provides a more realistic representation of completed trading results than displaying trade profit alone.

The Performance panel also displays the current month's realized result together with the number of completed trades.

Performance monitoring is account-wide and does not depend on a particular Expert Advisor or magic number.

This means the graph can reflect results from:

• Expert Advisors
• Manual trading
• Multiple trading systems
• A combination of automated and discretionary trading

Open positions are not included in realized performance until they are closed.

Advanced Economic News Monitor

Spread & News Sentinel also keeps upcoming economic events directly on the MT5 chart.

The expandable News Events panel displays upcoming events together with useful information such as:

• Currency
• Impact level
• Scheduled event time
• Countdown to the event

High, Medium and Low impact events can be included according to your preferences.

Configurable before-and-after time windows allow Sentinel to clearly identify when the market is inside your selected news period.

This provides useful context when spread conditions begin changing around important economic events.

You can see both:

What economic event is approaching

and

What is actually happening to the spread

from the same dashboard.

Multiple News Sources

The native MetaTrader 5 Economic Calendar can be used without additional WebRequest configuration.

An external economic news source is also supported.

The active news source can be changed directly from the Sentinel dashboard, making it easy to select the source appropriate for your setup.

External News Source

When using the External news source, enable WebRequest under:

Tools → Options → Expert Advisors → Allow WebRequest for listed URL

Add:

https://nfs.faireconomy.media

No WebRequest configuration is required when using the native MT5 Economic Calendar.

Clear Visual Warnings

Sentinel is designed to make important conditions easy to recognize.

The main status display can highlight conditions such as:

• Spread limit exceeded
• Active news period
• News information unavailable
• Normal / clear monitoring conditions

Optional audible alerts can also be enabled, with configurable cooldown protection to prevent repetitive notifications.

The goal is not to generate trading signals, but to make potentially important changes in the trading environment immediately visible.

Interactive Dashboard

The main Sentinel dashboard keeps the most important information available without filling the entire chart.

At a glance you can monitor information such as:

• Current spread
• Selected Maximum Spread
• 45-minute spread history status
• News monitoring state
• Active news source
• Selected news window
• Current Sentinel condition

The dashboard also provides direct access to the three expandable monitoring panels:

Spread

View the rolling 45-minute spread graph.

News Events

View upcoming economic events and countdown information.

Performance

View cumulative realized trading performance for the current month.

Panels can be opened when more detail is required and collapsed when you want to keep the chart clean.

Universal Market Monitoring

Spread & News Sentinel is not built around one hard-coded instrument.

It monitors the symbol of the chart where it is attached and uses that symbol's own MT5 point value.

This allows Sentinel to be used across many different markets, including:

• Forex
• Gold and Silver
• Stock indices
• Bitcoin and other supported crypto symbols
• Energy markets
• Other MT5 instruments offered by your broker

Because spread characteristics can differ dramatically between instruments and brokers, the user remains in control of the Maximum Spread setting.

A Different Kind of Trading Indicator

Spread & News Sentinel does not attempt to predict the next candle.

It is designed to answer a different set of questions:

What is my spread doing right now?

Has the spread been stable during the last 45 minutes?

Is an important economic event approaching?

How has my account performed so far this month?

By combining live spread monitoring, historical spread information, economic news and realized account performance into one visual dashboard, Sentinel provides traders with a clearer view of the environment surrounding their trading decisions.

Spread & News Sentinel

Monitor the market conditions around your trades.