A news trading rule restricts opening or closing positions in a window around scheduled economic releases - typically high-impact items like NFP, CPI and central-bank decisions. The usual window is two to five minutes either side of the release; some firms allow trading but refuse to count profits made inside the window.

Firms restrict news because the fills are unreliable in fast markets: a simulated environment cannot reproduce the slippage a real broker would show, so news profits are the least "real" money in the model. Penalties vary: FTMO allows news trading on most account types with restrictions on latency-exploitation strategies; FundedNext counts only 40% of profits from trades inside five minutes of high-impact news on correlated pairs, while losses count at 100% (help.fundednext.com, checked 28 October 2026).

Why it matters: a strategy that trades releases needs a firm that permits it, and the check is in the terms, not the sales page. The mechanics and windows: news trading windows; the adjacent holding rule: weekend holding.

Plain-language material on leveraged-trading risk is maintained by the ESMA investor corner.

Part of the rules & drawdown cluster and the full prop firm glossary.