my EA bleeds during news, should it just stop trading around red folder events
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my EA is consistently profitable except it gives a chunk back around high-impact news. the spread widens, it gets stopped on spikes, sometimes slips badly on entry. tempting to just have it pause trading 30 minutes either side of red folder events.
is a news filter the right fix, or am i papering over a deeper problem with the strategy?
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a news filter is legitimate, not cheating. plenty of soldi strategies simply have no edge during the chaos of a major release and the honest move is to sit out. pausing 15-30 minutes either side of high-impact events is standard. just make sure your filter pulls from a reliable calendar feed and handles timezone and daylight savings correctly, thats where homemade filters silently fail.
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agreed its legitimate. the test for whether youre papering over a problem: does the strategy lose during news specifically because of execution conditions (spread, slippage, spikes), or because its directional thesis is wrong during volatility? the first is solved by a filter. the second means the filter just hides a broader fragility.
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every backtest looks great once you remove all the times it would have lost. add a news filter, then a friday filter, then a monday filter, and eventually youve curve fit a strategy that only trades the three hours it happened to win historically.
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the troll names a real danger, filter creep is how people overfit by exclusion. the discipline is: only add a filter for a mechanism you can explain, not just a losing period you noticed. 'spread blows out during news so my entries are bad' is a mechanism. 'it loses on tuesdays' usually isnt. that distinction keeps the filter honest.
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use a well-known economic calendar with a documented data feed rather than scraping a random site. and crucially, test that your filter actually blocks trades around a known past event in the strategy tester before trusting it live. a filter that silently doesnt fire is worse than no filter because you think youre protected.
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the 'verify it actually fires' point is underrated. ive seen news filters that looked configured but the event-time parsing was off by the broker server offset, so it paused at the wrong moment entirely. always confirm against a real historical event.
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for what its worth, after adding a clean news filter my EAs equity curve got noticeably smoother without hurting total return much. the news trades were nearly a wash on average but added huge variance. cutting variance for similar return is a good trade in itself.
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smoother equity curve with similar return is also exactly what overfitting produces in-sample.forward test it on events it has never seen before you celebrate.
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fair, and easy to settle: keep the filter, run the EA forward on demo through the next month of news events, and compare filtered live behaviour to what the unfiltered version would have done. if the filter still helps on unseen events, it was a mechanism, not a fit. let the forward data deide.
the 'mechanism vs noticed losing period' line is going straight in my journal.Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
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