Time installing the indicator: Just a few minutes with our MetaTrader Pro setup
What does it do?
The Analytic Trading News Indicator for MetaTrader overlays up-coming and recent news events relevant to the instrument chart it is added to, with the optional display of all USD news events.
It will display screen alerts and send email alerts at specified times before events, and shows the typical impact of the event, previous and forecast figures – all taken from the data feed provided at forexfactory.com/calendar.php.
Credit for the original version of this indicator goes to DerkWehler and his excellent thread on Forex Factory where you can download his version for free. Our version is simply contains our added display and pip calculation functionality to work better for our needs.
What is it for?
Although we are technical traders, it is the news events that create the volatility we are looking for to find the best trade setups. It is also important to monitor news events when there is an open trade on the relevant instrument.
How do we use it?
By default, we have the news indicator displayed on our S&P 500 chart in the top-left window of all forex, commodity and index profile layouts, to monitor market risk-sentiment and events likely to cause significant price movements.
Then, when we have a trade open on an instrument, we will make sure we have one chart with the news indicator displayed so that we can monitor the price-action that evolves around risk events, to help manage our trades.
News Alert specific settings
In most cases these settings can be left on the default values, although users with different strategies or preferences to our own may want to be able to adjust them.
Variable | Default Value | Possible Values | Description |
IncludeHigh | true/false | true | The switch to show High volatility news events on the current forex instrument chart. |
IncludeMedium | true/false | true | The switch to show Medium volatility news events on the current forex instrument chart. |
IncludeLow | true/false | false | The switch to show Low volatility news events on the current forex instrument chart. |
IncludeSpeaks | true/false | true | The switch to show events where notable market influencers speak. |
IsEA_Call | false/true | false | The News indicator has the ability to trigger EA trades for developers. |
OffsetHours | 0 | -12 to 12 | The GMT/BST Offset for your local timezone. |
AllowWebUpdates | true/false | true | Set this to false when another indicator instance is already running on that same symbol and same period. |
Alert1MinsBefore | -1 | integer | The number of minutes before an event to show the first screen alert. |
Alert2MinsBefore | -1 | integer | The number of minutes before an event to show the second screen alert. |
Email1MinsBefore | -1 | integer | The number of minutes before an event to send the first email alert. |
Email2MinsBefore | -1 | integer | The number of minutes before an event to send the second email alert. |
ReportAllForUSD | true | true/false | The switch to show all USD news events regardless of the instrument chart used. |
EnableLogging | false | true/false | Debugging logs. |
ShowNextTwoEvents | true | true/false | The switch to show the on-chart text information for the latest 2 relevant events. |
ShowVertNews | false | true/false | The switch to show lines on the actual chart bars for news events. |
TxtSizeTitle | 7 | integer | The title text size. |
TxtSize | 7 | integer | The details text size. |
TxtColorTitle | Gray | any colour name or RGB value | The indicator title text colour. |
TxtColorNews | DeepSkyBlue | any colour name or RGB value | The news event name colour. |
TxtColorImpact | Red | any colour name or RGB value | The impact text colour. |
TxtColorPrevious | Peru | any colour name or RGB value | The previous text colour. |
TxtColorForecast | Lime | any colour name or RGB value | The forecast text colour. |
VertTxtShift | 21 | integer | The distance of the bar lines text from the bar |
VertLeftLineShift | 900 | integers | How far away to the left of the line we want to place our vertical news text. |
VertRightLineShift | 200 | integers | How far away to the left of the line we want to place our vertical news text. |
VertLineColor | SlateBlue | any colour name or RGB value | The bar lines colour. |
VertTxtColor | DimGray | any colour name or RGB value | The bar lines text colour. |
VertTxtSize | 7 | integers | The vertical text size. |
NewsCorner | 2 | integers | The corner to display the next 2 events text display. 0=Upper Left, 1=Upper Right, 2=Lower Left , 3=Lower Right |
NewsXPos | 3 | integers | The distance from the chosen corner. |
SaveXmlFiles | true | true/false | The ability to generate daily Xml files of news events. These can be used with EAs capable of using them for filtering news events in backtesting. |