News filter is blocking all my trades

Causes, most likely first

1. Gold is sensitive to an unusually large number of releases

XAUUSD reacts to US inflation, employment, rate decisions and Fed commentary, which is a dense calendar. A filter blocking every high-impact event will legitimately sit out a meaningful share of the US session — that is the cost of the protection, not a malfunction.

2. The blocking window is wider than it needs to be

A window of an hour either side of every event blocks far more than one of fifteen minutes. Narrow it if you are missing too much, but understand you are accepting fills during the aftershock, which is where the worst slippage lives.

3. The calendar includes events that do not move gold

Not everything marked high impact matters to XAUUSD. A filter that blocks on all high-impact events regardless of currency will pause for releases gold does not react to. Filtering by USD relevance recovers a lot of session time.

Why this happens

The trade-off here is real and there is no setting that removes it. Trading through news means occasionally getting filled far from your intended price, in an environment where technical setups are not doing what they were measured doing.

The honest limitation is worth stating: a news filter handles scheduled events only. An unscheduled headline arrives with no warning, and positions already open when a release lands are fully exposed regardless of the filter.

If the filter is blocking so much that the strategy barely trades, the deeper issue is usually that the session window and the calendar overlap heavily. Shifting the window is often more effective than loosening the filter.