Impulse EA Comprehensive News Filter Guide
What the News Filter Is For
Big scheduled economic announcements — interest rate decisions, inflation figures, US jobs numbers — move gold violently and unpredictably. Price can jump further in thirty seconds than it normally does in a day, and it often jumps both ways before settling. Impulse builds positions gradually and works them back to a target, which is a sensible way to trade calm markets and a poor way to trade a stampede.
The News Filter is simply a diary. Before Impulse opens a new trade, it checks whether a major announcement is due. If one is close, it waits.
How It Decides When to Wait
The filter watches high-impact US dollar events by default. Around each one it draws a quiet window: two hours before and two hours after (both adjustable). Inside that window, Impulse opens nothing new.
Medium-impact events are ignored unless you switch them on — with one exception. A short keyword list (FOMC, NFP, CPI, PCE, rate decisions and similar) promotes a medium-rated event to high, because feeds occasionally under-rate the ones that matter most. Low-impact events are never promoted.
It only pauses new trades. Anything already open carries on completely as normal — it still adds positions, still manages itself, still closes at its target. The filter is a doorman, not an emergency exit.
Where the Diary Comes From
Impulse uses two sources, in order:
- ForexFactory — the main source, a well-known economic calendar. It's more complete and better-labelled than most.
- MetaTrader's own calendar — the backup, built into your terminal. It needs no setup and costs nothing to read.
If ForexFactory can't be reached, Impulse switches to MetaTrader's calendar straight away rather than sitting there retrying, so there's no gap in cover. It then keeps trying the main source quietly in the background and switches back once it's available again.
One setup step is needed for the main source: MetaTrader has to be told the address is allowed. In Tools → Options → Expert Advisors, tick "Allow WebRequest for listed URL" and add https://nfs.faireconomy.media/ , then restart the EA. Skip this and Impulse simply runs on the backup calendar.
Keeping the Diary Trustworthy
This is the part most news filters get wrong, and it's where Impulse takes the most care.
The diary is refreshed every four hours, and each refresh is built to one side and checked before it's allowed to replace what's already there. If a refresh comes back damaged or empty, it's thrown away and the last known-good diary stays in force. A bad update can never wipe out good information.
Impulse also keeps track of something subtler: whether it has actually confirmed the diary is real. There's a genuine difference between "I checked, and the next two days are quiet" and "I couldn't check at all." Both look like an empty page. Only one of them is safe to trade on.
So the filter records the moment each source was last successfully verified. If that verification is missing, or has grown too old, the diary is treated as unusable — not as good news.
The Safety Net: Fail-Closed
Here's what happens when Impulse can't confirm its diary is reliable.
Rather than shrugging and trading anyway, it stops opening new positions until a source is confirmed working again. This is the setting called "Block new baskets when calendar data is unavailable/stale," and it's on by default.
The reasoning is straightforward: trading with no idea what's coming is a worse risk than sitting out for a while. Sitting out costs you some missed opportunities. Walking into a rate decision blind can cost considerably more.
As always, open positions are untouched — they keep running normally throughout. Only new entries pause.
You can turn this off if you'd rather the EA keep trading regardless of calendar health, but you should do that knowing exactly what you're accepting.
How to Tell What's Happening
The on-chart panel shows the filter's state in plain words. Hovering over it gives the full reason.
| Panel shows | What it means |
|---|---|
| News Filter: ON | Diary confirmed, nothing due. Trading normally. |
| News Filter: BLOCKED (red) | An announcement is close. Waiting for the window to pass. |
| News Filter: BLOCKED (amber) | The diary can't be confirmed. Holding off new trades as a precaution. |
| News Filter: UNPROTECTED | The diary can't be confirmed and you've chosen to trade anyway. |
The Experts log also writes a line each time a source is confirmed, and again whenever entries are paused or resumed because of diary health — so an outage overnight is still visible the next morning.
If You See a Problem
An amber BLOCKED that doesn't clear means neither source is supplying usable data. Two things to check: that the ForexFactory address is whitelisted and the EA has been restarted since, and that MetaTrader's own calendar is enabled and populated (open the Calendar tab in the terminal and confirm it has upcoming entries). Fixing either one restores normal trading automatically — no restart, no intervention.
Turning the protection off will get you trading again immediately, but it treats the symptom rather than the cause. Better to restore a working source first.
