What Breaks First Under a Spike
Stops fill where liquidity is, not where your chart marked the level. On a copied book, every follower inherits that slippage in proportion to size. A leader scratch can still be a daily-loss event on a smaller evaluation if the fill is worse than planned.
Intraday trailing drawdown can mark an open spike as a new high-water mark before price settles — then the pullback breaches the floor even if you never intended to hold through the print.
Treat the Calendar as a Risk Input
FOMC, CPI, NFP, and similar releases are known windows. If your plan does not explicitly include trading them, flat before the number is a position — not cowardice.
If your plan does include them, size for gap risk, not for normal tick MAE. Micros and reduced multipliers on followers are the usual compromise.
Copy-Specific Choices
Decide whether the leader is allowed to hold through the event at all. If not, flatten the group before the window — do not rely on hoping every follower dashboard gets checked in time.
Webhook strategies that fire into a news candle need the same discipline: an alert is not wiser than a discretionary click when the book is wide.
- Pre-define flat windows for high-impact releases.
- Cut follower multipliers before the event if you must stay engaged.
- Confirm daily loss and trailing buffers while you still have room.
- Review news days separately in the journal — they skew MAE/MFE.
What Enforcement Can and Cannot Do
MimikTrader can flatten and lock when a limit is hit. It cannot invent liquidity inside a one-second spike. The job of risk settings around news is to keep the blast radius small — not to promise clean fills.
Check current firm rules: some products restrict news trading or treat certain windows differently. MimikTrader does not speak for any firm.
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