ECB, Bank of England and Bank of Japan days: how to journal them

The remaining 2026 dates from each bank's own page, which pairs they touch, and how to review your trades around them.

Not financial advice. This page is educational information about how to prepare and review trades around scheduled events. It does not tell you what to buy or sell, it does not predict any market move, and trading leveraged products can lose more than you expect. Dates and times come from the official sources linked on the page and can change, so confirm them before you rely on them.

The Federal Reserve gets most of the attention, but a trader of euro, pound or yen pairs has three more dates to put in the calendar: the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan. Each publishes its own schedule, and each decision matters most for the currency it issues. This page lists the remaining 2026 dates from the central banks' own sites, explains how the three differ, and shows how to tag and review the trades you take around them.

The dates, from each bank

Sources: ECB Governing Council calendar, Bank of England upcoming MPC dates and Bank of Japan monetary policy meetings. The Fed's own dates are on the FOMC days page. Schedules can be changed, so check the bank's page in the week you trade.

How the three differ

• ECB: the Governing Council meets over two days. The monetary policy decision and a press conference are on the second day, and the ECB publishes the schedule with the press conference listed.
• Bank of England: the Monetary Policy Committee announces on a Thursday. The announcement dates are set a year ahead and the Bank publishes them as single dates.
• Bank of Japan: the Monetary Policy Meeting runs for two days and the decision is released at the end of the meeting. The Bank does not publish a fixed time on its schedule page, so check the bank's release on the day.

Times of day differ and change when clocks change, so find the exact time on each bank's own release before you convert it to your broker's clock. This page does not give times it has not checked.

Which of your pairs does each decision touch?

A decision matters most for the currency the bank issues. An ECB meeting concerns the euro, so EURUSD, EURGBP and other euro pairs are the obvious ones. A Bank of England meeting concerns sterling, and a Bank of Japan meeting concerns the yen, so USDJPY, EURJPY and GBPJPY are the usual ones. Gold and indices can also react to any of them, but how is not predictable, and this page does not forecast it. What you can do is record, for each pair you trade, whether you took trades inside the event window, so that you can compare them with trades outside it.

Tag every trade near a central bank decision

The first step is to be able to find those trades later. In the journal, give each trade you took close to the release a tag such as news: central bank, and add a second tag for what you did: flat before, held through, entered after or faded the spike. Tags cost ten seconds and are the only way to compare news trades with ordinary ones afterwards. The tagging guide shows a simple scheme.

What to write in the notes

• Whether the trade was planned before the release or taken in reaction to it.
• Your size compared with a normal trade. Many traders find they trade bigger or smaller on event days without deciding to.
• The spread you saw when you entered. MetaTrader 5 history does not store the spread at the time of a trade, so a note or a screenshot is the only record.
• How you felt. A sentence is enough: calm, rushed, afraid to miss it.

Check slippage with the data you already have

AI Trading Journal records each closed position's stop loss and its exit price, and it keeps the last non-zero stop it found on the position's orders. For a trade that ended on its stop, the gap between the two numbers is a rough measure of slippage. If your stop was at 1.0850 and the exit price was 1.0842, the stop filled eight pips worse than planned. This only works when the stop was not moved after entry, so check the notes. For how stops show in history, see history comments sl, tp and so and stops level and freeze level.

Find the release in your broker's clock

MetaTrader 5 stamps deals in the broker's server time, and a journal built from that history shows the same clock. To find the trades around a release you have to turn the official time, usually given in Eastern, London or Tokyo time, into server time. The page on MT5 server time explains how to find your broker's offset, and the session times converter does the arithmetic. Check the conversion in the weeks when the United States and Europe change their clocks on different dates, because the usual gap between New York and London briefly changes.

A worked example (hypothetical)

A trader of euro pairs tags trades with the bank involved: ECB, BoE or BoJ. After a year there are 11 ECB trades, 7 BoE trades and 5 BoJ trades. The ECB trades are +$260 in total, the BoE trades -$180 and the BoJ trades -$40. The totals do not mean the BoE is a bad event for them. Seven trades is far too few. What the tagging shows is that the BoE trades were mostly in pairs they rarely trade otherwise, which suggests a habit to examine: why take trades in unfamiliar pairs because of an event?

A calendar habit that scales

• At the start of each quarter, copy the next decision dates from the three bank pages into one list.
• Next to each date, write the pairs you actually trade that the decision could touch.
• On the day, write one line: will I trade it, wait or stay out.
• The next morning, add one line to your notes: did I do what I wrote?

This takes minutes and fits easily into a weekly review. The weekly trading review checklist has a place for it, and the market watch section of this site lists the scheduled events for each week once a week starts.

What the journal does and does not do

AI Trading Journal reads your closed trades from MetaTrader 5 on your Windows PC and saves them in a journal on your computer, with notes, ratings, tags and screenshots for every trade. It does not read central bank news, it does not know the decision dates and it never places or changes trades. The dates come from the official pages above and the tags come from you. The P&L calendar then shows how event days sit among the others.

Limits

• This page does not forecast any decision or market reaction.
• Dates come from the central banks' own pages at the time of writing and can change. Times are not given because they must be checked on the day.
• Closed-trade history cannot show the spread at the time of a trade or the path of a stop.
• Nothing here is trading or investment advice.

More event routines: GDP and PCE days and holiday and thin-market days.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• A local trading journal for MT5
• P&L calendar for MT5
• Trade notes, ratings and screenshots
• Trading progress and goals
• Back up your journal and move it to a new PC
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• How to set monthly trading goals
• Import your whole MT5 history
• How to tag trades
• Trade screenshots for your journal
• All trading journal comparisons