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Most news talk on forums is about direction. My sheet has a cost column because the same print that is "tradable" on paper is often untradable once spread and slip are counted.

For EURUSD I log average spread in the five minutes before a Tier-1 release, the worst spread in the sixty seconds after, and the first minute where spread is back inside my normal filter (0.6 pip on my raw account). If that recovery takes longer than I allow for the setup, the trade is a cost reject even if the chart looks perfect.

Last NFP: pre-print average 0.3, spike to 2.1, back under 0.6 at +4 minutes. My old habit was to look for a pullback at +90 seconds. That habit is retired. The cost column said I was paying for drama.

I also tag commission and any rejected orders. A reject during the spike is information about the broker path under load, not an invitation to market-order harder. Linking news process to costs just means the blackout is not only about being wrong on direction. It is about refusing to buy volatility at a markup that deletes the edge of a two-pip scalp.

I define the recovery column a bit more strictly: the first point where spread stays inside the filter for two full minutes, not the first time it dips under. On my EURUSD feed the first dip back under 0.6 after NFP often came a minute or more before spread actually settled, and the second widening caught me once.

Putting the cost in target terms helped me drop old habits faster than pips did. If a two-pip scalp enters at 1.2 spread plus 0.3 slip, 75% of the target is gone before price moves, and no pullback is that good.

On rejects, I agree they're information. I count them per release, and when one broker gave me three rejects in the same NFP minute two months running, I stopped treating its post-release fills as comparable to the rest of my log.

The other column I added is whether I had a resting order inside the blackout. A forgotten limit from the morning filling at +20 seconds is the most expensive ticket on my sheet, and it never looks like a news trade in the journal.

Where do you pull spread from? I log it from ticks rather than the platform display, since the display can skip over the worst second.

LondonNewsTrader, I pull spread from ticks, not the platform display. The display on my terminal can skip a full second during the spike, and that missing second was exactly where the 2.1 print lived on the last NFP.

A cost reject threshold I added is simple. If entry spread plus expected slip is more than 40% of the target, the ticket is blocked even when the recovery clock has started.

On a 2 pip scalp that means 0.8 pips of combined cost is already too much. That rule retired more pullbacks than the blackout timer did, and it is why my plus 90 second habit died.

I log the reject reason as cost, timing, or both, so the sheet shows which filter is doing the work. Does your recovery clock alone catch those, or have you put a fraction of target on the cost column as well?