Discussing the article: "Which Economic Releases Actually Move Your Symbol, and by How Much?"

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Check out the new article: Which Economic Releases Actually Move Your Symbol, and by How Much?.

A calendar release is not a category but a number against a consensus. In MQL5 we build a robust, standardized surprise (actual minus forecast scaled by each indicator's own dispersion), recover the broker's daylight saving schedule from price to anchor each release on the bar that moved, and regress price response by symbol and horizon. The result is a measurable profile in pips per sigma showing which events actually move your market.

The usual way to handle an economic release inside an Expert Advisor is to treat it as a category. It has a name, a currency, a scheduled time, and an importance flag, and the standard thing to do with it is to stand aside: block trading for thirty minutes either side of anything marked high impact. The only tuning available is the importance threshold and the width of the window, and neither of those has anything to do with the release itself.

But a release is not a category. It is a number arriving against an expectation. Two payrolls prints can share the same importance flag, the same currency and the same clock time, and one of them will move EURUSD fifty pips inside a minute while the other barely registers. The calendar does carry a directional label for each release, in the impact_type field of every calendar value, so the platform is not silent on the question. What a label cannot express is how far, and how far is the whole difference between those two prints.

The quantity that separates them is the surprise: the actual figure minus the forecast, scaled so that it means the same thing across indicators measured in completely different units. In this article we build that quantity in MQL5, and then we measure what it actually does to price.

Author: Muhammad Minhas Qamar