A news window keeps an account from opening new trades around a major economic release, such as a jobs report. Some firms have their own rules about trading around news.
The window
In Bot settings, under the news rule, set how many minutes before and after a release the window covers. You set it per account. Off means the account trades straight through releases. The Connections page shows the window each account is on, and links back here.
While a window is open, new entries are refused. The Activity page's Everything else tab records each one as price being inside a news window. Positions already open keep their stops and targets, untouched.
An order already resting when a window opens
An entry order may already be waiting at your broker when a window opens. What happens to it is a separate choice, set per account in the same place. There are three options:
- Pull the order. Wildflower's default. The resting entry is cancelled at your broker while the window is open, so it cannot fill into the release. That includes an order placed a moment before the window opened, which Wildflower finds at your broker by the tag it puts on every order it places. Wildflower places the order again once the window closes.
- Leave the order where it is. The decision made when the order was placed stands. If it fills during the window, the market reached a price you had already chosen. This is what a backtest models, so live and backtest match.
- Re-check at the fill. The order stays, and the fill is screened again at the moment it happens. If it lands inside a window, the position that just opened is closed at market straight away and the activity feed records it as a news window, the same as a refused entry. This is the only one of the three that ends a trade you are already in, so choose it only if your firm's rules make being in a trade through a release a problem. A backtest does not model this check, so those fills are a place live and backtest can differ.
The default pulls the order because the strictest firms ban news entries outright, and the cost of being strict is one missed trade.
What can go wrong
If the window is off, neither answer above changes anything yet, because there are no windows for them to act on. And if Wildflower cannot read the window an account has stored, it refuses new entries on that account and says so on the card; choosing a window again clears it.
If a cancel does not go through and your broker confirms the order is still resting, Wildflower emails you the order number so you can cancel it by hand. It will not mark an order cancelled that it has not seen cancelled.
And Wildflower never cancels an order it cannot prove is its own, because that order could be one you placed by hand at your broker. In the rare case it cannot match an order to the trade it was pulling, it leaves that order exactly where it is rather than guessing.