MT5 News Exporter
- Utilities
-
Christian Koehler
We are a highly qualified team of experienced programmers and trading experts who have set ourselves the goal of revolutionising the world of trading.
Our approach is simple and clear: we develop EAs based on simple and understandable strategies that deliver profitable results. - Version: 2.0
- Updated: 9 November 2026
Export the MT5 economic calendar – for realistic EA backtests with a news filter
The economic calendar is not available in the MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester. EAs with a news filter therefore cannot detect key events such as Non-Farm Payrolls, inflation data or interest rate decisions in backtests. Results look better or worse than they would in live trading.
MT5 News Exporter solves this. It exports events from the MT5 calendar to a CSV file (news.csv) that any EA can load, both in the Strategy Tester and in live trading.
Benefits:
- Realistic backtests: your EA avoids news events in testing exactly as it does live.
- Saves time: no manual searching for event dates, the export takes only seconds.
- Language-independent: each event is stored with a fixed event code (e.g. nonfarm-payrolls) and its event ID, so filters work regardless of the terminal language.
- Past and future: historical events from any start date, plus upcoming events for live trading.
- Safe: an existing file is only overwritten after the new data has been loaded successfully.
- DST check: after the export, the journal shows the server time of the last NFP release in January and in July. Both times should match.
Input parameters:
- File name: name of the file (default: news.csv)
- Start date: start of the export in the format YYYY.MM.DD, e.g. 2018.01.01
- Also export upcoming events: number of days from today to include upcoming events (default: 60)
- Currencies: one or more currencies separated by commas, e.g. "USD" or "USD,EUR". Leave empty for all currencies.
- Minimum importance: all events, moderate and above, or high importance only (default)
- Also export forecast / actual / previous values: additionally writes these values to the file
How to use:
1. Open "Tools → Calendar" once so MetaTrader 5 loads the calendar data.
2. Drag MT5 News Exporter onto any chart. Symbol and timeframe do not matter. Do not run it in the Strategy Tester, as the calendar is not available there.
3. Export on the same broker server you backtest on. All times are stored in the broker's server time.
4. Repeat the export from time to time to keep upcoming events up to date.
File location:
The file is saved in the common folder shared by all MetaTrader terminals. On Windows this is:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\MetaQuotes\Terminal\Common\Files
This means every EA on every installed terminal can access it.
