The economic calendar and news feeds

Two widgets in the customer terminal are backed by two full admin screens:

Both are under Admin → Forex Trading → Market Data, and both offer create, edit and delete — unlike the instrument catalog next to them in the same menu.

Neither feed is required. A desk with no calendar provider at all still runs a usable calendar, by hand. That is the design decision the rest of this page follows from.

Two kinds of row in one table

Every row on both tables carries a source of PROVIDER or MANUAL.

Anything you create on these screens is MANUAL with a null externalId, and that null is exactly what keeps the sync away from it. Nothing in the sync path ever reads, updates or deletes a MANUAL row.

So an operator with no paid calendar feed can enter Non-Farm Payrolls, the ECB rate decision and CPI by hand every month and the terminal widget works identically. It is the supported fallback, not a hack.

Editing a provider row is not durable

News behaves differently, and the difference is worth knowing: a story is immutable once published, so the news sync leaves existing rows untouched and an edit to a provider news row does stick.

What is not durable on either table is a delete. The sync re-inserts by externalId, so a provider row you delete comes straight back on the next run that still sees it in the vendor's window.

The durable operator control over a bad provider row is its status:

Set it false and the row stays in the table, keeps being refreshed, and is never returned to a customer — the public calendar and news routes filter hidden rows out. That is the right answer for a duplicated release, a garbage headline or a story you do not want on your terminal.

Both screens' create/edit forms end with a Visibility group holding exactly that switch.

What you can author

A calendar row

Required: title (≤191 characters), eventTime (ISO 8601, UTC) and impact — one of LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH.

Optional: country and currency (≤8 characters, upper-cased on write), and the four figure fields actual, forecast, previousValue and unit, each capped at 32 characters.

The figures are strings, not numbers, deliberately. Vendors publish 3.2%, 1.5M and -0.1, and normalising them would throw away the unit a trader needs to read. Type them exactly as you want them displayed.

currency is what drives the terminal's per-symbol filter, so it is the field to fill in. Provider rows get theirs from a country-to-currency map covering the unambiguous majors; an unmapped country simply leaves currency null, and a row with no currency is always included in the unfiltered calendar.

A news row

Required: headline, which is converted to plain text on write and capped at 500 characters.

Optional: summary (plain text, capped at 5,000), publishedAt (ISO 8601; defaults to now on create), url and imageUrl, category (≤64) and relatedSymbols — a comma-separated list or JSON array, upper-cased and capped at 25 entries.

relatedSymbols is not decoration either. The customer news route's symbol filter matches a story that names either leg or the closed-up pair (EURUSD) in its headline or summary — or carries the symbol as an operator tag. Tagging is how a desk note reaches a scoped feed without naming the pair in its prose.

The feed-status banner

Both screens render a banner above the table, fed by one endpoint:

An empty table has three completely different causes and only one of them is something you can act on, so the banner distinguishes them.

The same payload also tells you calendarImplementers and newsImplementers (which adapters could serve each feed) and keyedProviders (which of your provider rows actually hold an API key in the environment). The banner turns those into the concrete instruction — set APP_FINNHUB_API_KEY and restart the backend.

The sync's outcome is persisted in a single settings row, fxTradingCalendarSyncState, as JSON.

Only Finnhub serves either feed

CALENDAR_IMPLEMENTERS and NEWS_IMPLEMENTERS are both ["finnhub"]. Twelve Data, TraderMade and Polygon implement neither, and asking them returns NOT_IMPLEMENTED rather than an error.

On Finnhub's own tiers the two feeds differ:

• News is free on the same key.
• The economic calendar is a paid endpoint. A free key gets a 403 that the adapter deliberately re-classifies as PLAN_LIMIT rather than AUTH, so a perfectly good key is not banned over a paywalled feature.

The permission trap

Grant a calendar/news editor all of these together:

The screen gates are historical. view.forex_trading.instrument is marked keep: true in the permission-key rename migration precisely so it can fan existing grants onto the finer data keys. Narrowing the screen gates to match the routes changes who can open the pages, so it has not been done.

The access.forex_trading.* family is very much alive, so do not read the two access. rows above as a mistake. access.forex_trading gates the addon landing and the settings screen, access.forex_trading.execution the two execution screens, access.forex_trading.instrument, .order and .position the symbol-group, order and position screens, and the platform-wide operations summary checks access.forex_trading.withdraw. What is specific to access.forex_trading.economic_event and access.forex_trading.news is that no migration carries an existing grant onto them and no backend route checks them: they are seeded as grantable rows that no role holds until you tick them by hand. That is survivable on the table, which says Access denied out loud, and would not have been on the middleware screen gate, where the same miss redirects with ?auth=false and reads as a broken menu.

The sync job

Admin → System → Cron, Fx Calendar & News Sync (syncFxCalendarAndNews), period 15 minutes, category forex_trading.

That last line is deliberate: an unimplemented capability or a paywalled endpoint is a configuration state, not an incident. It is also why the banner exists — the cron writes a log line nobody reads, and the banner is what puts the same information in front of the person staring at an empty table.

Endpoints

The two customer-facing routes are public — this is market data, not account data — and neither ever returns a hidden row.

Next

• Market data providers — which vendor serves what, and how to test a key before committing it
• API reference — the customer calendar and news routes and their query parameters
• Settings and reference — every permission key and every scheduled job in one table