If you trade a funded or prop firm account, you've probably read the rule a dozen times: no opening or closing trades within 2 minutes before to 2 minutes after specific high-impact news. Sounds simple. In practice, it's where most funded traders get violations — not because they ignore the rule, but because it's surprisingly easy to miss the edge cases.
This post walks through exactly what the rule means, the traps people fall into, and how to handle it cleanly with an automated tool.
The 2-minute rule, plain English
When the rule is active, you cannot:
- 🚫 Open a new trade
- 🚫 Close an existing trade manually
- 🚫 Have a Stop Loss or Take Profit trigger
- 🚫 Have a pending order activate
Anything that touches the books inside that 4-minute window can be a violation. The rule applies only to instruments tied to the news currency — USDJPY during US news, but you can still trade EURGBP.
You can keep positions running through the window if they were opened earlier. The rule is about the act of opening or closing, not about being in the market.
Step 1 — 📰 Know which events actually count
Most prop firms publish a list of restricted events. It's not "every high-impact news" — that's a common misconception. The typical list includes:
- 🇺🇸 United States: NFP, CPI, Fed Funds Rate, FOMC Statement, Unemployment Rate, Average Hourly Earnings, Crude Oil Inventories
- 🇪🇺 Eurozone: ECB Main Refinancing Rate
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: BoE Bank Rate, MPC Vote, CPI
- 🇨🇦 Canada: BoC Overnight Rate, CPI, Employment Change
- 🇦🇺 Australia: RBA Cash Rate, CPI, Employment Change, GDP
- 🇳🇿 New Zealand: RBNZ OCR, CPI, Employment, GDP
- 🇨🇭 Switzerland: SNB Policy Rate
Events like ISM PMI, JOLTS, New Home Sales, or Consumer Confidence are high-impact but typically not restricted. You can still trade through them — and that's important, because over-blocking your trading kills your edge.
Step 2 — ⏰ Get your time zones right
Most economic calendars publish times in EST/EDT (New York). Your broker's MT5 server probably runs in GMT+2 or GMT+3 (typical for European brokers). If you mismatch by an hour, your "2 minutes before" becomes "58 minutes after" — and you'll get blindsided.
The reliable way: take the GMT time from the calendar source, add your broker's offset, double-check on a calendar that shows broker time. Or use a tool that does this automatically.
Step 3 — 🚧 Block new trades early, not just at T-2
Here's where most people get bitten. They tell their EA: "Stop opening trades 2 minutes before news." So at 13:28 they're still placing trades for a 13:30 news release. The trade opens, the news hits 90 seconds later, the SL triggers — violation.
Better approach: start blocking new trades 15 minutes before the active 2-minute window. This gives existing trades time to either close naturally or run through. You're not over-blocking — you're just being honest about how long it takes a trade to develop a buffer.
Step 4 — 🛑 Decide what to do with open trades
You have two options when the active window starts:
Option A — Remove SL/TP: Keep the trade open but strip its stop loss and take profit so they can't trigger inside the window. Re-attach them after.
Option B — Close the trade: Close everything before the window starts. Reopen later if your strategy still has a signal.
Option A keeps your upside. But it has a fatal flaw: if news causes a strong adverse move, your position runs without a stop loss and could blow your daily loss limit. Option B is the right call for funded accounts — sacrificing some upside to guarantee compliance and risk control.
Step 5 — 🤖 Coordinate multiple EAs
If you run more than one EA on the same account, they all need to know when to stop. The clean way is signal-based coordination: one EA (the news filter) sets a flag that the other EAs read before opening trades.
In MQL5, GlobalVariables work perfectly for this. Convention:
PNF_BLOCK_USD = 1 // USD currently restricted PNF_BLOCK_EUR = 1 // EUR currently restricted
Each EA checks GlobalVariableCheck("PNF_BLOCK_" + currency) before opening a trade. Quiet, fast, no forced closes needed.
Step 6 — 🛡 Add a defensive second layer
Coordination through GlobalVariables works only if all your EAs respect the signal. What if you forgot to update one? Or you place a manual trade?
A second defensive layer: monitor for any new trade appearing in a blocked symbol, and close it within seconds. This catches manual trades, EAs you forgot to update, and edge cases.
Step 7 — 📊 Don't forget weekend and holiday close
The 2-minute rule isn't the only news-related rule. Most non-Swing funded accounts also require positions closed before:
- 🌅 Weekend market close (Friday night, time depends on the symbol)
- 🎄 Major holidays (Christmas, New Year's, regional bank holidays)
The trap here is using fixed times like "Friday 22:00" — different symbols have different close times. Forex closes at one time, indices at another, gold at yet another. The right approach is to read the actual session times from the symbol info and act based on those.
Step 8 — 🧪 Test on demo for at least one full week
This is the step everyone skips and everyone regrets. Before using any compliance tool on a funded account, run it on a demo for at least one full week that includes scheduled news events. Watch the panel react. Check the log file for actions taken. Verify the times align with the actual news on a third-party calendar.
If something is wrong, you'll find out for free. If you skip this step and find out on a funded account, you'll find out for $1,200.
A tool that does all of this
I built Prop News Filter Pro to handle exactly this problem. It uses the ForexFactory feed (works on any broker, including prop firm terminals where the MQL5 calendar is disabled), implements the two-stage protection model from Step 3, signals other EAs through GlobalVariables (Step 5), and handles weekend + holiday close automatically (Step 7).
There's also a free version called Prop News Filter (without "Pro") with the core news-rule protection — useful if you trade one chart manually and want to test how it works on your broker before upgrading.
Final thought
Compliance tools are insurance, not strategy. They protect what you've built but don't build anything for you. The best funded traders use them quietly in the background while focusing on the actual job — finding edges and managing risk.
If you're getting violation emails from your prop firm, the issue is usually one of the steps above. Audit each one. The tool is supposed to make it boring.
Trade safely. Test thoroughly. Read your prop firm's rules every quarter — they update.
