News filter for TradingView: stop trading into NFP, FOMC and CPI.

TradingView ships a decent economic calendar: you can overlay events on the chart and browse the dedicated tab. What it does not do is expose those events to the alert system. Alerts fire from prices, indicators, drawings and strategy orders — never from “CPI in 15 minutes”. There is no “economic_event()” function in Pine Script, and no webhook payload for a scheduled release.

The consequence for anyone automating: your TradingView-to-MT5 bridge executes every alert it receives, exactly as designed — including the alert your strategy fires 30 seconds before Non-Farm Payrolls. The strategy does not know the calendar exists. Neither does the alert. The filter has to live somewhere else.

Tier-one releases — NFP, FOMC decisions and pressers, CPI, central-bank surprises — hit execution quality, not just direction. In the first seconds, spreads on majors and gold can widen several-fold, liquidity thins, and stop orders slip. A stop-loss placed 10 pips away is still a stop-loss, but the fill you get is at whatever price the market gives you after the spike, not at your level.

For a trend-following or mean-reversion bot this is the worst trade in the sample: the entry signal fires into maximum noise, the stop is hit by a wick that mean-reverts two minutes later, and the loss lands at a size your backtest never saw because backtests do not model news slippage. One NFP candle can erase a quiet week. That is why “news filter” is one of the most searched TradingView add-ons — and why it has to be built, not toggled.

The most reliable place for the filter is the execution side, because it cannot be forgotten on the chart. SignalForge does not read an economic calendar — nobody can, TradingView exposes no news alerts — but it does have per-account time-window filtering: you define which hours and days each connected MT5 account is allowed to trade, and any alert that arrives outside those windows is simply not executed.

The weekly workflow: on Sunday, open your calendar, mark the week’s red-folder events in broker server time, and set the account’s schedule to skip those windows — typically 15-30 minutes before the release until the first 5-15 minutes after. The alerts still fire on TradingView; they just meet a closed door. It is a schedule filter doing a news filter’s job, and it works even while you sleep. Plans start at $4.99/mo with a 14-day free trial, no card required — see pricing.

The zero-tool route. Forex Factory and Investing.com both run free calendars with impact ratings. Filter to red (high impact) only, note the events touching your instruments, convert to your broker’s server timezone — this is the step everyone gets wrong once — and pause the alerts or detach the automation around them.

It costs nothing and it works, as long as the discipline holds. Its failure mode is human: the Thursday CPI you forgot, the holiday Monday, the speaker event that was orange until it moved gold 30 dollars. Use it if you trade one market and few events; combine it with Solution A the moment forgetting has a price.

Pine Script can read bar times, so a strategy can refuse entries inside a blackout window — a time-based condition around hardcoded timestamps, or the date-range inputs many published strategies already expose. If your strategy has “from/to date” inputs, narrowing the range around a known event is a crude but real news filter. Our guide to Pine Script alerts and webhooks covers how the alert side wires up.

The honest limits: Pine cannot read the economic calendar, so every blackout must be entered by hand, per event, per week; it breaks silently when you forget; and editing the strategy resets its alert. It is a complement to the execution-side schedule, not a replacement — defense in depth for the events you remembered.

Calendar review on Sunday (Solution B as the input), blackout windows enforced on the account (Solution A as the enforcement), a Pine guard where the strategy allows it (Solution C as the seatbelt). None of the three is a real calendar feed — until TradingView exposes one, every “TradingView news filter” is one of these three, or a paid third-party calendar API wired into your own code.

If you are comparing bridges on exactly this kind of risk control — schedules, position sizing modes, multi-TP, trailing, break-even — our honest best TradingView-to-MT5 bridge comparison lays out who offers what, and the webhook formats guide shows the alert syntax the filter applies to. The full connect walkthrough is in how to connect TradingView to MT5, and pricing is one flat page.