Holiday hours: the calendar nobody checks

[Shadow Trader]

Every year, spreads and liquidity shift around holidays, and brokers publish schedules for early closes and late opens that most traders never read.

What typically changes:

- US holidays like Thanksgiving, Independence Day and Christmas: thinner New York session, wider spreads, odd stop behaviour.

- UK bank holidays: London liquidity drops, and European pairs can drift.

- Japanese Golden Week: Tokyo liquidity thins and yen pairs can gap on low volume.

- Chinese New Year: onshore yuan markets close for days, which affects Asian session volume.

- Christmas to New Year: the infamous dead zone, where spreads sit wide, ranges collapse and sudden spikes appear from nowhere.

A scalper relying on volatility has nothing to work with in many of these windows. The ones who continue trading often find their strategy stops behaving as it normally does.

A quick holiday calendar on the wall or in the journal takes ten minutes to set up and protects against a dozen bad days a year.

Which holidays are traded through, and which ones get the day off? Does the data back up the decision?