How do you measure the real impact of economic news on an EA?

[Abel Masferrer Vinolas]

How do you measure the real impact of economic news on an EA?

I've been researching how automated trading systems behave around economic releases, and I've noticed that simply classifying events as Low, Medium or High impact doesn't tell the whole story.

Two High-impact events can produce completely different market reactions depending on the symbol, volatility and market conditions.

I've been experimenting with measuring things such as:

• Price movement 1, 5, 15 and 30 minutes after the release
• Maximum upward/downward excursion
• Time to peak movement
• Reversal after the initial reaction
• Historical median and percentile reactions for the same event
• Performance of EA trades exposed to news versus normal conditions

I'm curious how other algorithmic traders handle this.

Do you simply block trading around High-impact news, or do you measure the historical reaction of each event before deciding how relevant it actually is?

I'm currently building some tools around this idea for MT5, so I'm especially interested in approaches that can be measured objectively rather than manually classifying every event.