Trade the news

News trading relies highly on expert advisors or other automating tools and it is very rare to see traders trading the news without help from these tools. That’s because the main strategy of trading the news consists in placing two (or more) opposite pending orders just above and below the [price at that moment, when the volatility is very high and the spread is also bouncing.

 By using an expert advisor the trader can safely ensure that the pending orders will be places (well, depending on the EA Slippage might prevent it more or less). Without an expert advisor, however, it is almost impossible for the trader to place the pending orders pips away from the price, in the allotted time (ie before the news).

So what the traders usually do is set an EA to place the pending orders 1 minute or so before the news release. When the news w\are released, the price - and this is what the news strategy relies on - is expected to go either up or down, triggering one of the pending orders (buy or sell). The trader then can safely close the remaining pending order and focus on managing the winning trade. But this is not it. Thanks to expert advisors such as OCO News, this can also be done automatically.

One Cancels Others expert advisor

OCO stands for one cancels other and, as the name implies, it will automatically cancel the remaining pending order (or order, because this EA can place multiple opposite orders). Therefore, all that is left for the trader to do is to decide what news to trade, how many pending orders to place and when (before the news), and also the trade management criteria such as take profit, trailing stop, stop loss etc.

Below is an example of how easy it is to set an expert advisor to trade the news, following the OCO approach.

There are other EAs capable of doing this, no doubt, but the news trading EA from RobotFX is free to download (at least for demo accounts). If you are successfully trading the news using a different trading strategy, feel free to comment and explain it below.