A Free Economic Calendar API for Trading Bots

Every automated strategy eventually asks the same question: is there news in the next half hour? Answering it needs a machine-readable economic calendar, and that turns out to be harder to find than the calendar itself. Most are web pages. The few feeds that exist are rate-limited, paid, or disappear without notice.

This guide is the short version of that search, and the endpoint we ended up building and opening to everyone.

🗺️ Where Bots Get the Calendar Today

None of these is wrong. Each one just fails in a way that a robot running unattended on a VPS does not notice until it has traded through a rate decision.

🎯 What a Bot Actually Needs

Strip the question down and the requirements are few:

1. The next day or two, not the next year. A filter looks hours ahead.
2. Filtered on the server: only the currencies the bot trades, only the impact it cares about. A few kilobytes, not a megabyte.
3. Unix timestamps in UTC. Every platform can compare two integers; nobody enjoys parsing dates in MQL.
4. Built for polling. Hundreds of robots asking every 15 minutes should be normal traffic, not abuse.
5. No key, no account. A key is one more thing to leak, rotate and support.
6. Reachable from every platform, including the ones that restrict network access.

🔓 The Endpoint

GET https://showmytrades.com/api/public/calendar/v1?currency=EUR,USD&impact=high&days=1

Each event has ts (Unix seconds, UTC), time (ISO 8601), currency, impact, title, forecast, previous and actual. Responses are cached 15 minutes and carry an ETag; the limit is 600 requests per minute per IP address. Everything is on the reference page, including a CSV layout designed so that MQL's StringSplit() cannot get it wrong.

Three calls, in three languages:

curl "https://showmytrades.com/api/public/calendar/v1?currency=USD&impact=high,medium&days=7&format=csv"

import requests

events = requests.get(
    "https://showmytrades.com/api/public/calendar/v1",
    params={"currency": "EUR,USD", "impact": "high", "days": 2},
    timeout=10,
).json()["events"]

next_release = min(events, key=lambda e: e["ts"]) if events else None

const res = await fetch('https://showmytrades.com/api/public/calendar/v1?currency=GBP&impact=high&days=1')
const { events } = await res.json()
const soon = events.filter(e => Math.abs(e.ts * 1000 - Date.now()) < 30 * 60 * 1000)

🔌 Per Platform

The cTrader case is the one that justifies the WebSocket: a cBot in the cloud cannot make an HTTP request at all, and most cTrader users run in the cloud. The socket speaks the same four parameters and returns the same CSV.

🧭 Designing the Filter Itself

The API answers when. The strategy decides what to do, and the usual choices are:

• Window. 30 minutes before and after a high-impact release is the common default. Scalpers go wider after; swing systems sometimes only block entries in the minute of the release.
• Which currencies. Both sides of the traded pair. Gold and indices usually watch USD alone.
• Open positions. Blocking new entries is the easy half. Closing or tightening stops before a release is a strategy decision, with its own costs.
• Failure mode. If the download fails and the bot has no calendar, should it trade or wait? Decide explicitly; the sample code trades, and says so.

⚖️ What the API Is Not

It is a schedule, assembled from public calendar sources and served as-is. Releases are sometimes moved or cancelled, surprise announcements are by definition not on it, and the impact level is a classification, not a prediction of the move. It is information to build a filter with, not a signal.

❓ FAQ

Is it really free, for commercial robots too? Yes. No key, no account, no tier. A credit, Economic calendar by ShowMyTrades linked to the calendar page, is appreciated and never required.

How often should a bot call it? Every 15 minutes. That is the cache lifetime, and the calendar does not change faster. With If-None-Match an unchanged calendar costs nothing.

What time zone are the times in? UTC, always. ts is Unix time in seconds; time is the same instant in ISO 8601 with a Z.

Can I get history, to backtest a news filter? Not from this endpoint: the window reaches back six hours and ahead up to 30 days. Historical calendars for backtesting are a different product with different terms.

Where does the data come from? Public economic calendar sources, merged and normalised by ShowMyTrades. The same data drives the calendar page on this site.

🔗 Related

• Economic calendar API reference
• How to add a news filter to your MT4 Expert Advisor
• News filter in MT5: built-in calendar or API
• How to add a news filter to a cTrader cBot

A robot that knows when to stay out is a robot whose track record you can show. Connect it free, and the quiet half hours around the news will be visible on the drawdown chart.