News trading rules: a two-minute window, and a different answer per plan

Read the news clause as a description of the firm's risk and its shape stops looking arbitrary. In the seconds before a scheduled print the resting book thins, and in the seconds after it reprices in jumps. You are trading a simulated account, and the firm has to decide which of your fills it could reproduce in a live market where it carries the other side. A fill taken two ticks off the print inside a one-second vacuum is exactly the fill it cannot reproduce, which is why the published clauses cluster in a one-to-two-minute band around scheduled numbers instead of banning volatile sessions outright.

The second thing these clauses target is strategy shape rather than timing. Sizing your maximum permitted position directly into a release, or working both-sides orders so that whichever way the number breaks one of them fills, is prohibited at firms that publish no clock at all. Those clauses describe intent and size, so they can be broken on a day when your timestamps are clean.

• Liquidity: the resting book thins before the print, so a stop can fill a long way from its trigger price.
• Fill realism: a simulated fill inside a one-second vacuum is the one the firm cannot repeat on a live hedge.
• Event risk: a binary release turns a sized position into a coin flip that the firm ultimately funds.

Filing every clause under "news trading: allowed or banned" is the wrong move, because published wording resolves into three shapes that fail in different ways. Two of them are testable from a timestamp. The third is a judgement the firm makes after the fact.

A flat-window clause tests the state of your account during the box, so an order placed well before the box opens can still put you inside it. In the worked example below the governing number is 8:28:00, two minutes ahead of the 8:30:00 release. Notice also which word the clause uses: flat means no open position, while flat with no working orders also captures a resting limit that never trades.

The consequence is a separate fact from the permission. At least one cell in the reference below calls a red-folder violation (red folder being the high-impact tier on a standard economic calendar) a hard breach, while others describe conduct that gets reviewed. Read the consequence sentence as carefully as you read the permission sentence.

• Windowed: be flat from N minutes before to N minutes after each listed event, with the stricter wordings extending across the event itself and to working orders.
• Class ban: a named tier of releases is off limits on certain account types for the whole session, with no clock to time.
• Unrestricted with a conduct rule: no window at all, but maximum-size entries into a scheduled release and both-sides gambling orders are still prohibited.

Passing an evaluation by trading every release and then carrying that routine onto the funded account is the failure this section exists for. Risk moves phase by phase: during the evaluation the firm's exposure is a simulated account and a fee it already collected, while on a funded account your profit becomes a payout claim it has to pay. Restrictions concentrate where the money leaves, so several cells in the reference below publish no news restriction on any evaluation and a strict flat window on the qualified or funded product sold under the same brand.

The same asymmetry runs across plans inside a single phase. One plan family can carry no flat-around-news clock while a sibling plan under the same brand name treats red-folder news as a hard breach. A firm-level verdict of "allowed" is therefore a false summary for at least one plan, which is why the reference below prints each firm's own cell instead of a single badge.

Screenshotting the page that says what you wanted and closing the tab is how traders breach a rule they have already read. A firm's plan page and its help-centre policy article are written by different people at different times and can disagree about the same account. At least one cell in the reference below records exactly that: the policy article permits an event tier on evaluations while the firm's own plan page says that tier is not allowed on the evaluation for one plan. We surface the conflict and refuse to pick a winner, because a guess is the thing you would trade a release on.

The procedure is short. Operate on the stricter of the two pages until support answers, and ask in one sentence that names the plan, the phase and the event class, "On this plan, in this phase, may I hold a position through this release?" Keep the dated reply; it is the document you will want if a payout gets reviewed.

Where a clause lists releases individually and says nothing about the rest, that silence records what the firm chose to publish. It will not function as permission in a review, and it is worth asking about before you size into an unlisted print.

• Copy the exact minute counts: minutes before, minutes after, and whether the event itself is named separately.
• Note whether the wording says flat or flat with no working orders, because a resting order counts under the second.
• Write down which plan and phase the clause names; if it names neither, treat it as unresolved and ask.
• Record the consequence: hard breach, forfeited profit, delayed payout and conduct review are four different outcomes.