News Blackout Zones
Shades the blackout window around scheduled economic releases — the Fed decision, inflation and employment — using dates taken from their official sources.
The problem it solves
Pine Script has no economic calendar. There is no function that returns release times, and the economic-data function returns the values of indicators, not the moments they are published. So any news-blackout indicator has to have the dates injected into it.
How it is built
- Recurring rules, computed. Weekly jobless claims every Thursday, for instance. These keep working indefinitely without maintenance.
- A listed schedule for FOMC, CPI, PPI and the employment report,
taken directly from
federalreserve.govandbls.gov. - Manual slots for any additional event the user wants to mark.
A finding that changed the design. The common rule that the US employment report lands on the first Friday of the month is wrong. In 2026 it was released on a Wednesday (11 February), a Thursday (2 July), and a second Friday (9 January). Every date is therefore listed from the official source rather than computed from a rule.
Daylight saving
An 8:30 AM New York release falls at 12:30 UTC in summer and 13:30 UTC in winter.
The times are therefore declared in the America/New_York zone rather than
as a fixed offset, so the windows do not drift by an hour twice a year.
What it adds over what already exists
TradingView has a built-in economic-events feature that marks releases under the bars. The addition here is not showing the dates, but:
- A shaded blackout window with adjustable duration before and after, differentiated by the impact of the release
- An exportable
No-Trade Flagthat any other script can read throughinput.source()to suppress its own entries inside the window - Alerts when a window opens and closes
Limits, stated in advance
- The listed schedule expires and must be refreshed each year. This is stated plainly in the description.
- A thirty-minute blackout is meaningless on a 4-hour chart. The tool is practical from 1-minute to 1-hour only.
- It cannot cover unscheduled events — which usually produce the sharpest moves.