News Sweep Sentinel

The trade this tool is waiting for

Stop-outs that reverse the moment you are gone follow a pattern: price pushes through an obvious level, takes the orders resting behind it, then closes straight back inside. News Sweep Sentinel [ZynAlgo] exists to catch the second half of that move, not the spike itself.

It refuses to act on the break. A level being pierced proves nothing; what matters is whether price can hold beyond it. Only when price fails to hold - and closes back through the level it just swept - does the tool speak.

What it tracks:

• Prior swing highs and lows across a 20-bar lookback, treated as resting liquidity
• The pre-event range, its high, low and midpoint, built from the 30 minutes before a scheduled window
• Sweep candles, judged on how far they cleared the level and how much of their range was wick
• Reclaim closes back inside the level, within a grace window
• Volatility, measured as ATR(14) against a 50-period ATR baseline
• Live spread on the confirmation candle, and an optional H1 EMA200 bias filter

There is no built-in economic calendar to query on this platform, so event windows are supplied by you. Recurring Daily HH:MM Proxy Times ships with 08:30, 12:30, 14:00, 14:30 and 18:00 UTC - the slots most macro releases land in - and you can edit that list to match the sessions you trade.

The swept level, and what makes a sweep count

A swept level is any prior swing high or low that price has traded through and then abandoned. The tool marks it, labels it SWEPT with the price, and keeps it on the chart as a reference while the setup is alive.

• Swept levels are drawn as dashed lines with a SWEPT label carrying the exact level
• Blue arrows below a bar are buy sweeps, orange arrows above a bar are sell sweeps
• Vertical dotted lines mark event windows on the chart
• A lower pane plots the working values - wick ratio, ATR, ATR baseline and spread - on a shared 0-100 scale, plus lanes for News Window, Cooldown and Setup state
• The panel shows Setup as Idle, BUY ARMED or SELL ARMED, so you can see a setup forming before it fires

Two errors are common around news. The first is trading the spike, which is where spreads are worst and direction is least reliable. The second is dismissing the whole session as untradeable and missing the reversal that follows. Requiring a reclaim handles the first; keeping the setup armed for a grace window handles the second.

How a qualified sweep is defined

A sweep is only registered when every one of these holds:

• Clearance - the candle must push past the swing level by at least 0.15 x ATR; a level merely touched does not count
• Wick evidence - at least 35% of the sweep candle range has to be wick, which is what rejection looks like
• Reclaim - a later candle must close back through the level within 15 bars, or the setup expires
• Invalidation - 6 consecutive bars closing beyond the swept level cancel the setup entirely
• Volatility - ATR(14) must be at least 0.85 x its 50-period baseline, and the confirmation candle range must stay under 3.0 x ATR so a single violent bar is rejected
• Spread - the confirmation candle has to close with spread at or below 30 points
• News window - built from your Recurring Daily HH:MM Proxy Times list; the panel shows News Window Active or Inactive

Regular sweeps, premium sweeps, and the silence in between

Signals arrive in two tiers, and each one is labelled with the level it came from rather than a bare arrow.

• BUY SWEEP / SELL SWEEP - a qualified sweep and reclaim of a prior swing level, labelled with the swept price. This is the everyday signal and it does not need an event window
• PREMIUM BUY / PREMIUM SELL - the same structure occurring inside an active event window or its 60-minute confirmation tail, where the liquidity grab is most deliberate

Reading the chart:

• One signal per swept level - once a level has produced its signal it will not fire again
• At least 6 bars must pass between signals in the same direction
• The panel reports each gate as Pass or Block - ATR Pass, Spread Block, HTF Block, Cooldown Clear - so a quiet chart always has a stated reason
• The optional H1 EMA200 filter is off by default; switch it on to take longs only above the average and shorts only below it

Because the windows are times you supply rather than a live feed, keep the list short and relevant to the pairs you trade. Regular sweep signals do not depend on the window at all.

Stop and target guides are available but ship switched off. When enabled, the stop sits 0.25 x ATR beyond the swept wick, with targets at 1.0R, 2.0R and 3.0R. Treat them as reference geometry - sizing and execution remain yours.

Who this is built for

News Sweep Sentinel [ZynAlgo] is aimed at traders who already know that the first candle after a release is a trap:

• Gold traders on M1 to M15, where sweeps around scheduled releases are most pronounced
• Forex majors at M5 to M30 and indices at M1 to M15
• Liquidity and structure traders who want the sweep-and-reclaim sequence detected rather than eyeballed
• Anyone who has been stopped out by a wick and then watched price return without them

It is not a tool for quiet markets, and it is deliberately silent when spread or volatility conditions fail. That silence is the feature.

Installing it: copy the .ex4 file into the MQL4/Indicators folder inside your terminal data folder, refresh the Navigator panel in MetaTrader 4, then drag News Sweep Sentinel onto a chart. Swing lookback, sweep buffer, wick ratio, spread cap and event windows are all editable on the Inputs tab.

-> Browse the ZynAlgo marketplace

Trading involves risk. Nothing this indicator draws is a recommendation, and past chart behaviour does not predict future results.