News Marker
- Utilities
- Version: 1.13
News Markers Description
Version: 1.13Type: MetaTrader 5 indicator (chart window)
Purpose: Plots economic-calendar news events as color-coded vertical lines on the chart, with optional currency tags and an upcoming-news HUD panel.
Before you start — three things that always apply
- Live connection required. The data comes from MT5's built-in economic calendar via your broker's feed. It returns nothing in the Strategy Tester, and nothing if your broker doesn't serve calendar data. If no lines appear, open the Experts tab — the indicator logs a diagnostic when the calendar comes back empty.
- Importance colors are consistent everywhere. Low = yellow, Medium = orange, High= red (all configurable). Lines, tags, and HUD rows all use the same three colors so at glance tells you the severity.
- Times are in your broker's server time. Calendar timestamps and chart bars should align, but on first use, sanity-check a known release against the bar it lands on. If everything is shifted by a constant number of hours, that's a broker time-offset worth noting.
Scope — how much calendar to load
Controls the time window of events pulled from the calendar.
Settings:
- Days of PAST events to load & plot [How many days of past events to load and plot.]
- Days of FUTURE events to load into memory [How many days of future events to load into memory. (Future events aren't necessarily drawn yet — see "DRAW upcoming events once within this many minutes of now".)]
- DRAW upcoming events once within this many minutes of now [A future event's line is only drawn once you're within this many minutes of it. Keeps the chart's right side clean until news is imminent, then the line appears and rolls into the past as time passes. Set to 0 to draw all loaded future events immediately.]
Tip: A wide "Days of PAST events to load & plot" with many currencies/importance's enabled draws a lot of lines. Narrow the window or use the filters below if it gets dense.
Importance Filter
Three independent on/off toggles for which severity grades to show.
Settings:
- Plot LOW importance events (gold) [Plot low importance events (yellow).]
- Plot MEDIUM importance events (orange) [Plot medium importance events (orange).]
- Plot HIGH importance events (red) [Plot high importance events (red).]
Currency Filter
Six independent toggles for which currencies' events to show. Events of any other currency are ignored.
Settings:
- US Dollar events [Show US Dollar events.]
- Euro events [Show Euro events.]
- Japanese Yen events [Show Japanese Yen events.]
- British Pound events [Show British Pound events.]
- Australian Dollar events [Show Australian Dollar events.]
- Canadian Dollar events [Show Canadian Dollar events.]
Line Appearance
Controls the vertical lines.
Settings:
- Low importance line color [Color of low-importance lines.]
- Medium importance line color [Color of medium-importance lines.]
- High importance line color [Color of high-importance lines.]
- High importance line style [Line style for high-importance events.]
- Medium importance line style Dash [Line style for medium-importance events.]
- Low importance line style [Line style for low-importance events.]
- Line Width [Line thickness in pixels.]
- How often to refresh the calendar (seconds) [How often the calendar is re-queried and the chart refreshed.]
Why per-grade styles? When two events of different grades land on the same time, a solid red line and a dashed orange line stay distinguishable where two identical lines would merge.
Merge Same-Currency Events (same timestamp)
When several events of the same currency are released at the exact same time (e.g. NFP +Unemployment + Hourly Earnings all at 14:30), they can collapse into one line and one tag, with every event listed in the tooltip.
Settings:
- Merge same-currency events at the same time into one line/tag [Merge same-currency, same-timestamp events into a single line/tag. The tooltip lists every merged event, sorted highest grade first then alphabetically.]
- Tag color when a merge contains MIXED importance grades [When a merged group spans different grades, the tag is recolored to this so you instinctively check the tooltip. The line]
Keeps its highest-grade color, so severity still reads at a glance.
How a merge looks: the line takes the highest grade present (so a group containing any high-impact event shows a red line). A merged tag gets a + marker, e.g. [USD+]. If the grades are mixed, the tag also takes the "Tag color when a merge contains MIXED importance grades".
Currency Tag (top/bottom of line)
A small [CUR] label at the edge of each line, telling you which currency the news belongs to without hovering.
Settings:
- Show a [CUR] tag at the edge of each line [Show the [CUR] tag at the edge of each line.]
- Use [E] instead of [EUR] (single first letter) [Use a single first letter ([E]) instead of the 3-lettercode ([EUR]). All six currencies' first letters are unique(U/E/J/G/A/C).]
- Nudge same-time/same-edge tags rightward (e.g. [E][G]) [When several tags share the same time and edge, nudge each one rightward into its own slot so they sit side by side, e.g. [E][G], instead of overlapping.]
- Horizontal step per cluster slot (% of one bar's width) [The horizontal step per cluster slot, as a percentage of one bar's width. Larger = wider gaps between side-by-side tags.]
- Tag font [Font for the tags (Consolas, Lucida Console, Courier New, Verdana, Tahoma, Segoe UI, Arial).]
- Tag font size [Tag font size.]
- High-importance tag distance from edge (% of visible range) [How far a high -importance tag sits from its edge, as % of the visible price range.]
- Medium-importance tag distance from edge (% of visible range) [Same, for medium importance.]
- Low-importance tag distance from edge (% of visible range) [Same, for low importance.]
Why per-grade offsets? Different-grade events at the same time stack in separate "lanes" so they don't sit on top of each other — high nearest its edge (most prominent), medium and low stepped inward.
A tag also gets a "stem" dash toward its line so the text isn't cramped against it — e.g. [EUR]-|-[GBP] for two tags fanned to opposite sides of the same line. This is automatic and depends on the anchor (below).
Currency Tag Placement (Top / Bottom edge)
Chooses whether each currency's tags sit at the top or bottom of the chart. The classic use: on a EURUSD chart, put USD at the top and EUR at the bottom — then a glance up shows all USD news and a glance down shows all EUR news, regardless of importance.
Settings:
- USD tags edge [Top Which edge USD tags pin to.]
- EUR tags edge [Bottom Which edge EUR tags pin to.]
- JPY tags edge [Top Which edge JPY tags pin to.]
- GBP tags edge [Bottom Which edge GBP tags pin to.]
- AUD tags edge [Top Which edge AUD tags pin to.]
- CAD tags edge [Bottom Which edge CAD tags pin to.]
The per-grade offsets mirror automatically: top-edge tags measure down from the top, bottom-edge tags measure up from the bottom, with high-importance always nearest its edge. Tags track the edge as you scroll and zoom.
Currency Tag Anchor (Left / Center / Right of line)
Chooses which side of its own line each currency's tag sits on. Pairing this with the top/bottom placement lets you fully separate two colliding currencies — e.g. USD anchored Left (text to the right of its line) and EUR anchored Right (text to the left of its line) pull apart cleanly.
Settings:
- USD tag anchor relative to its line [USD tag side relative to its line.]
- EUR tag anchor relative to its line [EUR tag side relative to its line.]
- JPY tag anchor relative to its line [JPY tag side relative to its line.]
- GBP tag anchor relative to its line [GBP tag side relative to its line.]
- AUD tag anchor relative to its line [AUD tag side relative to its line.]
- CAD tag anchor relative to its line [CAD tag side relative to its line.]
Left = text extends to the right of the line. Right = text extends to the left of the line (ends at the line). Center = text straddles the line (no stem Dash).
Upcoming News HUD
An optional panel listing upcoming events, soonest at the top, each row colored by its grade. Useful as an at-a-glance "what's coming" board.
Settings:
- Show the upcoming-news HUD panel [Show the upcoming-news HUD panel.]
- Calendar days to include (1 = today, 2 = today + tomorrow, ...) [How many calendar days to include. 1 = the rest of today; 2 =today + tomorrow; etc. (Independent of the line settings above.)]
- HUD font [HUD font.]
- HUD font size [HUD font size.]
- HUD anchor corner [Which chart corner the panel anchors to (Upper/Lower ×Left/Right).]
- HUD X distance from corner (pixels) [Horizontal distance from the corner, in pixels.]
- HUD Y distance from corner (pixels) [Vertical distance from the corner, in pixels.]
- HUD background color (default near-black) [Background panel color.]
- HUD header text color [Color of the "Upcoming News" header row.]
Row format: Mon 14:30 USD [High] Non-Farm Payrolls (long names truncated). Rows use the same currency and importance filters as the lines — it shows the same selected news, just as a forward-looking list. The panel auto-sizes to the number of rows and the longest line, and text is left-aligned for clean reading even when rows differ in length.
Tip: For the tightest background fit, use a monospaced HUD font (Consolas, Lucida Console, or Courier New) — proportional fonts (like Tahoma) make the auto-sized width an approximation, so the panel may be slightly wider or narrower than the text.
Quick recipes
Clean EURUSD overview:
Majors only USD tags Top / EUR tags Bottom
USD anchor Left, EUR anchor Right
High + Medium only
HUD upper-left, 2 days ahead.
Just the big stuff, minimal clutter
Plot LOW importance events, Plot MEDIUM importance events: "FALSE" (High only);
DRAW upcoming events once within this many minutes of now: low (e.g. 30) so future lines appear only when imminent; HUD on forthe look-ahead.
Busy news session, keep tags readable:
Use [E] instead of [EUR] (single first letter) "TRUE".
Nudge same-time/same-edge tags rightward (e.g. [E][G]) "TRUE" → [U][E] side-by-side.
Merge same-currency events at the same time into one line/tag: "TRUE" so same-currency piles collapse to one tag.
