A usable gold news-momentum journal records the release, the surprise versus consensus and its direction, entry latency in seconds from the print, spread paid and slippage in dollars, and exit reason. Read in aggregate, these fields reveal edge decay by release type, by latency bucket and by slippage cost per trade.
A gold news-momentum journal needs five core fields per trade: the release, the surprise versus consensus and its direction, entry latency in seconds from the print, spread paid at entry, and slippage between planned and realised stop or entry price.
Because tradable events are scarce — roughly three to eight a month — edge-decay is read through subgroup comparisons rather than a single win rate: average R by release type, slippage cost per trade, and hit rate split by entry-latency bucket, most often showing that entries taken eight minutes or later after a release carry almost all of the positive expectancy.
Syncing MetaTrader 5 into the GoldHunts journal automates spread, slippage and timestamp capture, leaving only release type, surprise direction and exit reason to tag by hand, which turns a fifteen-to-twenty-trade review into a five-minute exercise rather than a reconstruction from memory.