Improvements from a live-verified audit of the news/calendar pipeline:
- Currency tagging: keyword matching now uses letter-boundary regexes
and drops ambiguous "us "/"eu "/"uk " tokens — "versus" no longer
tags headlines as USD (confirmed live false positive polluting the
XAU/USD sentiment average).
- Fetch caching: calendar events and headlines are cached class-level
(10 min TTL, 60s retry after empty/failed fetch, lock-guarded for
concurrent scans). Stops per-scan refetching that was tripping the
Forex Factory rate limit; TTL stays under the 30-min pre-event
buffer so the danger window can't go stale.
- Surprise detection: EconomicEvent.surprise is computed from parsed
actual vs forecast (handles %, K/M/B/T suffixes, negatives). A
surprise print widens the post-release caution window to 45 min;
inline releases keep the original 15 min.
- Gold-aware sentiment: headlines are scored per currency, with
monetary-policy keywords (hawkish/rate hike/tightening vs dovish/
rate cut/easing/stimulus) inverted for XAU — "hawkish Fed" headlines
scored +1.0 for gold before, -1.0 now (verified on live feed).
- New sentiment sources: Google News gold-focused query and CNBC
Economy RSS (verified live; 40 → 74 unique headlines). Added
cross-feed title dedup so syndicated stories count once.
- events_today now buckets by UTC date (feed timestamps carry US-
Eastern offsets); --json output includes news_description.
- Removed dead NewsConfig.min_impact and unused HIGH_IMPACT_EVENTS.
Tests: 142 passed (7 new covering boundary matching, surprise
classification, post-event windows, cache reuse, gold inversion).
A/B on M15 2025-03-30→2026-05-31 with $0.30 spread + gap-through fills
(511 identical entries, only exits differ):
factor 0.8 / min_rr 0.4: +36.1R (avg +0.071R, SELL +1.2R)
factor 1.0 / min_rr 0.5: +66.8R (avg +0.131R, SELL +9.6R)
Worse in both train and validation halves and both directions. The 20%
tighter targets buy +1.8pt win rate but shrink every win while the fixed
spread stays constant. The knob remains for re-tuning with costs included.
Live pipeline:
- Drop still-forming candle before analysis (signals no longer repaint)
- Direction-aware MTF agreement + opposition gate (no trade against 2-of-3 TF consensus)
- SELL volatility gate: block shorts in low/normal vol regimes (config sell_vol_regimes)
- Divergence: 40-bar lookback, price/indicator swings must align within ±2 bars
(fired on 0.5% of trades before, 29% after), trending weight 2.0→1.0
- RSI regime_aware by default; transitioning regime only signals at extremes
- ADX ±DM tie no longer nudges bearish; TP2 clamped beyond TP1
Backtester realism:
- Charge $0.30 round-trip spread (--spread), gap-through SL/TP fills at bar open
- Resolve trades on RAW price path (cache stores raw bars, cleaning runs on load)
- Weekend/session filters use bar-close decision time to match live wall clock
Validated per-step on M15 2025-03-30→2026-05-31 under identical pricing:
+46.9R → +66.8R, win rate 69.9% → 73.0%, SELL side -2.3R → +9.6R.
Tested-and-reverted: ROC weight removal (-13R), BB fade suppression (-11.6R),
candlestick de-weight (-2R) — composite thresholds are co-tuned with weight mass.
M5 already broadcast through the shared _scan_timeframe path but was
documented as data-only (docstring, CLAUDE.md, DOCUMENTATION.md, plus a
phantom `if tf == M5: return` step that never existed in code). Align all
docs/comments so M5 alerting at C+ grade is the intended, documented behavior.
Remove the live dashboard entirely per request: the 30s refresh loop,
per-scan refresh, boot send, and the dashboard-only stats layer
(_signal_stats / _stats_updated / _update_signal_stats and its call sites,
_format_stats_dashboard and its helper constants). Drop now-unused ZoneInfo
import and dashboard mentions from help/autoscan/boot messages and the test
suite. The WebSocket level-breach monitor and level cache are untouched.
Tests: 136 passed, 0 failed.
The old `weekday() >= 5` check blocked all of Sunday, but the forex
market reopens Sunday 22:00 UTC (Sydney open). Now uses proper time-based
check so the bot fetches data and generates signals on Sunday evening.
- Move index dedup before OHLC consistency fix in _validate_and_clean
to prevent crash when df.loc[dup_idx] returns Series instead of scalar
- Add global flood backoff: detect RetryAfter, pause all sends/edits
until ban expires instead of retrying and escalating the ban
- Stop dashboard edit-fail → new-message spam cascade: track consecutive
failures, only resend after 3 failed edits
- Increase dashboard refresh from 5s to 30s, min send interval to 1.5s
- Add comprehensive QA test suite (140 tests across all 7 modules)
Harwinder Sekhon