The strategy downloads the DailyFX News for the current week every n seconds and can be configured to trade depending on if news that comes out is <,>,= the expected/previous value, or greater than or less than zero (positive/negative). It does not depend on the above linked indicator to operate.
The configuration is a bit confusing but you can setup pretty much any combination of the above rules, like:
When less than expected - sell
or when less than previous - sell
or when greater than zero - buy
To handle multiple possible rules, and multiple possible announcements at the same time, it assigns a point in each direction where the rule is met. So after it evaluates the configured rules for each news event if it had 10 buy rules be true and 5 sell rules be true, then the score is 10:5 and it will buy once.
Now - some news announcements have both a previous and expected value. It doesn't make sense to assign two points to the same news event, so you also have a parameter that allows you to choose if it should use previous or expected when the two would be applicable. The two would only be applicable if you have a rule setup for both the expected and previous values AND the news announcement has both expected AND previous values.
The strategy does not track if the news is due now or not, it simply keeps checking for updates and if there is suddenly a new Actual value in the file, then the news must have just come out. This means if the news is late you won't miss it, also if you set it up to only check the news every 4 hours, you'll get all 4 hours of news in one hit.
Additionally, there are other timing issues like.... suppose 8 items of news are supposed to be announced at 10:30:00 am, and you setup the strategy to check for new news every 10 seconds. If 4 news events come out at 10:30:05 and then the strategy checks at 10:30:10, it might trade.
5 seconds later at 10:30:15 another 3 news come out and at 10:30:20 the strategy sees the updates, it might trade again. When the final one comes out, it might trade again.
If you want to avoid this, don't check every 10 seconds
The default is every 60 seconds. The minimum is 10 seconds to prevent everyone overloading the DailyFX server.The last thing worth mentioning is the strategy appears to be back-testable, but I do not believe it would operate properly as I don't think it waits for the news to load properly before continuing. If requested, I'll try to find some way to make it work properly in the back-tester.
Cheers,
MooMooForex
The Strategy was revised and updated on December 11, 2018.
