What moves the Forex price? For stocks, it is probably a lot more obvious. The company is getting good growth, they launch new products that might get more market share, and the growth of their earnings per share might impact the stock price positively. How about forex? It’s a currency between two countries or multiple countries ( eg. EURUSD is Europe vs United States). The reason to move the price could be a new policy from a government of the currency, some VIP mentioning something in a public speech, political and subtle changes in the region or nearby countries, or an announcement of a recent economic indicator.
No matter what is the reason to move the price, it basically can be categorized into two categories – A planned event and an Incident. A planned event is like the announcement of an economic indicator ( Eg. CPI, PPI, Interest Rate Decision, NFP and a public speech from a US Federal Reserve Member. An incident is an unplanned event that happens in a sudden. (Eg. Israel-Palestine War, a terrorist attack such as recent Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, and sanctions to a certain country)
For the incident, there is nothing much that we can do about it. It is the luck factor in forex trading. For planned events, which are the majority of the reasons to move the forex price, it is something that we can manage in Forex Trading to reduce risk.
Managing Planned Events
In the past, we always sent emails out to all our clients to inform them of certain periods that we should stop trading Ophiuchus EA and Limitless EA to avoid certain news announcements. Based on the feedback that we received from our client, some clients avoid that period and manage to reduce the risk of margin calls. Some clients miss that email or forget to set the stop trading period and then hit the margin call. Of course, we also have cases in which we recommend stopping the trading period but the news announcements do not cause too much volatility.
To avoid the situation of missing out on stopping trading and automating the whole process, a few months ago, we started to develop avoid trading on news announcements feature in Ophiuchus EA. Of course, this feature can be used for other EAs such as Limitless EA.
Going to MetaTrader 5
To be able to get upcoming economic indicator calendars or news announcements, we need to use the calendar library feature from MetaTrader 5. As this calendar library is only available in MetaTrader 5, hence, this avoids trading on news feature is only available in the Ophiuchus MT5 version. The Ophiuchus MT4 version will not have this feature.
We recommend all new clients or existing clients to go Ophiuchus MT5 version to get the benefit of this feature.
Avoid Trading On News Feature
In the latest Ophiuchus version, there will be a new blue panel on the left bottom of the chart, which is the Upcoming News Panel. This will list the top 10 upcoming new announcements based on the search criteria in the configuration.
On the Top left trading panel, we also added a Stop Trading Period Indicator, which lets the user know when it will stop trading a new series of Martingale orders. This stop trading period indicator can be influenced by either setting a manual stop trading period, by Avoid Trading on News feature, or by Avoid Trading before the weekend.
Please note that the stop trading we mentioned here is about stopping trading a new series of Martingale Orders. Any existing order will continue to trade until it is closed. You can refer to the Common Feature of Limitless Trading EA to understand more.
Configuration
There are a few configurations for the Avoid Trading on News feature.
- Avoid Trading on News – The default is True to turn on Avoid Trading on News. If you prefer to manage the stop trading period yourself like last time. You can change it to False.
- Keywords used to filter events separated by | – There are many news or economic indicators every day. We need to filter so that we only filter out those that are dangerous.
- In the past, the News we avoided were Interest Rate Decisions, CPI, and Nonfarm Payroll. Hence, the default value is “Nonfarm|CPI|Interest Rate”.
- If you prefer to be more conservative, you can go with this setting“Nonfarm|CPI|Interest Rate|Trade Balance|Retail”, which we refer to BabyPips for the most volatile news report.
- New Impact by level 1-3, lowest to highest – For each new, an impact score is assigned to it, from 1-3, lowest to highest. If you only want to avoid the highest impact score, you can put 3. If you want to avoid medium and high-impact news, you can put 5, which is 2 +3. If you want to avoid all new impacts, you can put 6. This configuration has to be used together with Keywords. Most of the keywords we listed in default are 3 for impact score, but CPI is 2 for impact score. Hence, the default value is 5 to ensure we filter our CPI news too.
- News search duration to search by days – The upcoming duration to search for upcoming news. The default is 14 days.
- Hours before the Announcement to stop trading – This is the duration before the news the EA stopped trading new series. The default is 24 hours before the news announcement. You can make it shorter or longer if you think it stops too early or too late.
- Hours after Announcement to start trading – This is the duration after the news the EA will start to trade new series. The default is 6 hours before the news announcement. You can make it shorter or longer if you think it stops too early or too late.
Avoid Trading Before Weekend
We also added this feature to allow the EA to automatically stop trading new series when it is near to weekend. It is useful for those who do not want to hold a position over the weekend. It can also help to prevent swap fees for holding positions over the weekend.
Although there is no news or economic indicator that will be announced on the weekend, those unplanned events or incidents are always possible at the weekend. Based on our experience, there are 1 or 2 times that some incident happens on the weekend ( Eg, Russia-Ukraine war), then on Monday when the market opens, EURUSD has a very big gap down. We were selling before the weekend and had a good profit on Monday when the market opens, but then since there is the possibility to gap down, of course, there is the possibility to gap up too. Hence, we added this feature here for our client to manage this risk if you want.
- Enable to stop trading before the weekend – True to stop trading new series before the weekend.
- Hours before the weekend to stop trading – This is the duration before the weekend to stop trading. The default is 6 hours. You can make it shorter or longer if you think it stops too early or too late.
Risk vs Reward
Obviously, by enabling these two avoid trading features, the number of trades will be reduced and the risk will be reduced too. Inevitably, the profit will be reduced too. However, the risk of margin call will be always there no matter how much we reduce the risk. The feature is available for all clients after you upgrade to MT5 and upgrade to this latest Ophiuchus version.
The default setting could be too “safe” for certain clients. Hence, you can play around with the avoid trading feature configuration above to slowly adjust it to suit your own risk profile. You just need to ensure when you change it, you need to monitor it closely to ensure that important news such as Interest Rate Decisions, CPI, and NFP are avoided.
In the future, when we have more data with this feature and if there is a need to update the configuration to avoid trading news, we will communicate through our mailing list.
Market Update
In 2024, for those news announcements that have already been captured by the EA default configuration, we will not send out market updates on this type of news anymore. However, if there is certain news that is not captured by the EA or we sense something is not right in the market, we will still send out Market updates for those observations. Hence, it is still important for all clients to ensure they are on our mailing list and ensure our email will not go to your spam folder.
Common Issue
There is one common issue that we are still investigating and not able to find the root cause yet. When you drag and drop the Ophiuchus EA on the chart for the first time, you might not be able to see the upcoming news panel and stop trading period indicator. If that happens, wait for 1-2 minutes to let some ticks over. If it still does not show the panel and indicator, you just need to close the chart and then open a new M1 EURUSD chart, and then drag and drop again. These two solutions should solve the issue.
Conclusion and Next Step
This avoid trading news feature is designed to provide flexibility for all our clients to manage their risk on Forex Trading. It will reduce your profit too. If you prefer the old way, you can always disable that feature and it will trade as it used to be but you need to monitor the market and news announcement to stop trading when required. If you find any issues or have any suggestions, please feel free to contact us.
For all our clients that are currently using Ophiuchus MT4 and fulfill the following conditions, we are providing a short period to convert to Ophiuchus MT5, free of charge if you submit your request to convert by submitting the following form before 15 Jan 2024. You will need to register an MT5 account first. Please note that we intend to increase the license fee for Ophiuchus in 2024.
- Your new MT5 account must be attached to us ( either by registering using our link).
- You must have purchased the Ophiuchus License from us directly ( not from another website).
- You must still have a valid Ophiuchus Master License. The newly issued Ophiuchus MT5 license will have the same validity as your MT4 one.
Updated on 17 Jan 2024. As the free conversion period is already over, if you need to convert from MT4 to Ophiuchus MT5, you will need to purchase the sub-license. Click below to purchase a sub-license.
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Ophiuchus EA$50 – $750
