Economic Calendar Edge Fields

An economic_calendar alias tracks official US macro announcement times. It has no prices; it tells your rules how far you are from the next and previous announcement.

This page covers the event selector, the four calendar fields and how their countdown behaves between refreshes, and a recipe that pauses a strategy around each announcement. Custom strategies on Kalshi and Polymarket US read a field as edge.<alias>.<field> once it is listed in the alias's fields. For the alias keys and refresh minimums, see Declaring and Reading Edge Data.

Calendar events

Write the tokens in capitals with no spaces, directly on the alias. Other events (such as NFP), lowercase and spaces fail with does not match required format. Nesting the event under selector: fails with requires event directly on the edge alias.

The alias fails, and ticks are skipped, if a selected calendar cannot be fetched or lists no announcements, or if the selected announcements together have none before or none after the current time (see When an alias goes missing). With FOMC,CPI, if one calendar has not yet published its next date, seconds_to_next counts to the other calendar's next announcement instead, with no error. Unscheduled meetings, or changes not yet on the official pages, are unknown to the Bot.

Calendar fields

Both seconds are measured when the alias is fetched and do not count down between refreshes. With the default 15m refresh, seconds_to_next can overstate the real time left by up to 900 seconds, plus up to one loop.interval, because a new fetch happens only when your loop runs. While fetches are failing, the last snapshot is reused for up to 3 × refresh (2,700 seconds at 15m); see The refresh cache.

Neither value is ever negative, so a condition such as seconds_to_next < 0 never matches. To act just after a release, use seconds_since_previous.

Blackout recipe

A blackout pauses a strategy around each announcement. Put a cancel_all rule at the top of your rules with an any block:

edge:
  macro:
    provider: economic_calendar
    event: FOMC,CPI
    fields: [seconds_to_next, seconds_since_previous]
    refresh: 5m               # the minimum; a slower refresh makes the blackout start later

rules:
  - name: announcement_blackout
    when:
      any:
        - {field: edge.macro.seconds_to_next, op: "<=", value: 2100}         # 30 min + one 5-minute refresh
        - {field: edge.macro.seconds_since_previous, op: "<=", value: 1800}  # 30 min after
    action: cancel_all

Because the first matching rule wins, every rule below the blackout, exits included, is skipped while it is active. cancel_all pulls resting orders but does not close positions. If exits must keep working during the window, put your exit rules above the blackout rule; the blackout then fires only on ticks where no exit matches.

Because the countdown is frozen between fetches, add margin to the "before" threshold:

• One refresh covers normal operation: 1,800 + 300 = 2,100 seconds for a 30-minute window at refresh: 5m.
• Three refreshes also cover calendar fetch outages: 1,800 + 900 = 2,700 seconds.

The "after" side needs no margin: the pre-release snapshot keeps the "before" condition true until the first fetch after the release. A calendar outage long enough to drop the alias blocks every entry. On Kalshi that also cancels resting entry orders, which acts like a blackout for quotes. On Polymarket US resting orders stay in place.

The 30-minute window is illustrative, not a recommendation. For a complete strategy built around a blackout, see Pausing quotes around FOMC and CPI.