You place a clean trade, price does exactly what you expected, and the firm voids it anyway — because it landed inside a news window you didn’t know existed. News rules are among the easiest prop-firm rules to break by accident, and among the least forgiving. Here’s what’s actually restricted and how to stay clear.
Why firms restrict trading around news
High-impact releases cause slippage, gaps, and spread blowouts — price can leap through your stop with no fill at the level you set. For a firm underwriting your losses, that’s uncontrolled risk on their capital. A news spike can also hand a trader an outsized win that owes everything to a coin-flip on a number, which is the opposite of the repeatable edge the firm wants to fund.
So most restrictions aren’t there to stop you profiting — they’re there to stop the firm eating unhedgeable tail risk and to filter out results that are luck rather than skill. Understanding the why makes the rules easier to respect: they’re guarding against exactly the kind of variance that also blows up undisciplined accounts.
Common windows: minutes before and after a release
The typical rule defines a buffer around the scheduled release time — a set number of minutes before and after during which you can’t open or, sometimes, must not hold a position on the affected instrument.
- Before the release: no new entries inside the window.
- After the release: no entries until the window closes and, at stricter firms, no holding through it either.
The exact length of the buffer, and whether it forbids only entries or also open positions, varies by firm and by account type. Some restrict only the directly affected instrument; others apply it broadly. Treat every figure you read as provisional and confirm the current window with your firm — for example how FTMO, FundingPips, and E8 Markets each define theirs — because the numbers differ and change over time.
Which events typically count as high-impact
Not every headline triggers the rule. Firms almost always tie it to a calendar of high-impact scheduled events — the ones that reliably move markets:
- Central-bank rate decisions and their press conferences.
- Major employment reports (such as US non-farm payrolls).
- Inflation prints (CPI, PPI) and key GDP releases.
- Scheduled speeches from central-bank leadership.
The common thread is that they’re scheduled and market-moving. Firms usually point to a specific economic calendar and an impact rating so there’s no ambiguity about which events count. Unscheduled shocks are a different conversation, but the rule you can actually plan around is the scheduled, flagged one — so the fix is simply knowing the calendar for your session.
How holding through news can void trades or breach rules
The dangerous misread is thinking the rule only blocks entries. At many firms, having a position open across the release is itself the violation — even if you entered long before the window.
Consequences range from the specific trade being voided (its profit stripped, its loss sometimes kept) to a soft warning, up to a hard breach at the strictest firms. A voided winner is especially brutal: you took the risk, the trade worked, and the profit simply vanishes from your eligible total. If it also contributed to a payout you were counting on, a single missed calendar entry can unravel a whole month.
The trap is a position you opened an hour earlier, forgot about, and left running straight into a release. That’s not a strategy decision — it’s an oversight. Which is exactly why this belongs to process, not willpower.
Build a news buffer into your session plan
The reliable defense is to make news a fixed part of your pre-session routine, not something you react to:
- Pull the calendar first. Before you trade, note every high-impact event in your session and mark the restricted window around each.
- Set a personal buffer wider than the firm’s. If the firm forbids a set number of minutes, give yourself extra on both sides. Being technically legal to the second is a bad place to live.
- Plan your exits backward from the release. Decide in advance whether an open position gets closed before the window or deliberately held flat through it — never let it be an accident.
- Size for the environment. Around volatile sessions, keep risk uniform so no single event-adjacent trade can dominate your results or your drawdown. A position size calculator keeps that risk constant regardless of how the day feels.
The deeper fix is to stop relying on memory. If your risk limits are enforced at the broker rather than held in your head, a moment of distraction can’t override them — the hard stop is already in place before the number prints. Shibiki holds those limits broker-side and journals every trade automatically, so your record shows exactly when each position was open relative to a release. That timestamped trail is what lets you prove a trade was clean — or catch, immediately, that one wasn’t — instead of arguing it out with a firm after the fact. If you run the same setup across several funded accounts, copying from one master means a single flat-before-news decision applies everywhere at once, so no forgotten account gets caught holding through the print.
News rules feel like a nuisance until the first time one saves you from a spike that would have blown your drawdown. Build the buffer, respect the calendar, and let the process — not your reflexes — keep you inside the line.
Related: position size calculator · FTMO · FundingPips