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 — on the execution side, fed by its own economic calendar.

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 live outside TradingView, where the orders are actually executed.

The most reliable place for the filter is the execution side, because it cannot be forgotten on the chart. SignalForge has a calendar-based news filter (Trader plan and above), configured in the dashboard and on by default: it blocks new entries from 30 minutes before to 15 minutes after high-impact events. Those are the defaults — you can change both windows and include medium-impact events too. The calendar data comes from the ForexFactory economic calendar, fetched by our system on the execution side, not from TradingView. A signal that arrives inside a blocked window does not open a new trade, but it does close the positions opposite to it (close-opposite is on by default). The details are on the news filter page.

Know its edges. In Auto mode the filter takes the two currencies from the chart symbol, so on index charts such as US30 or NAS100 you set the currencies manually. If the calendar cannot be fetched, it fails open: it does not block. It does not close all your open positions before the news — your stop-losses and your strategy handle what is already open — and no calendar can catch unscheduled events such as a surprise central-bank statement.

Separate from the news filter, SignalForge also has 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. It is a good complement: keep the session you never want to trade closed, or add a wider blackout in a week with several tier-one releases. The alerts still fire on TradingView; they just meet a closed door, even while you sleep. The news filter is included from the Trader plan ($14.99/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. On its own, use it only if you trade one market and few events; alongside Solution A, it becomes a Sunday check of what the filter will catch and what you want to add — medium-impact events, a wider window, the currencies behind an index chart.

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 news filter and schedule, not a replacement — defense in depth for the events you remembered.

The news filter enforced on the account does the heavy lifting (Solution A: high-impact events from the ForexFactory calendar, 30 minutes before to 15 minutes after by default), the per-account schedule keeps the hours you never trade closed, a Sunday calendar review (Solution B) covers what you choose to add, and a Pine guard where the strategy allows it (Solution C) is the seatbelt. TradingView still exposes no calendar to alerts, so whatever you use, the calendar data has to come from outside TradingView — and no calendar-based filter catches an unscheduled headline. For event-specific playbooks, see NFP trading automation, CPI trading automation and FOMC trading automation.

If you are comparing bridges on exactly this kind of risk control — news filters, 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.