Holidays that quietly wreck your spreads

[Shadow Trader]

Not every market holiday makes the news. A US bank holiday leaves American banks closed but European desks open. A UK bank holiday removes London, the biggest FX center, and EURUSD or GBPUSD suddenly trades like an Asian-hours market all day.

The calendar goes beyond the obvious ones. Golden Week in Japan can stretch to nearly ten days of reduced yen liquidity. Chinese New Year affects offshore yuan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and by extension AUD and NZD. Easter Monday thins out European trading, and Boxing Day does the same in the UK, Canada and Australia.

What makes holidays treacherous is that price often looks normal. The chart has candles, the volume indicator shows ticks. But depth is thinner, and the moves, when they come, are less orderly. A routine spread of 0.6 can turn into 1.5 at lunchtime.

Before each week, a quick scan of a holiday calendar for the main currencies takes two minutes. It tells which sessions to expect as weak, and which pairs are most affected. The platform's economic calendar often hides holidays under a small flag, easy to miss.

A habit that catches most of these: keep a one-line holiday list for each currency traded, and glance at it every Sunday. The calendar entries for bank holidays are usually listed as "all day" events with no time, which is why they slip past people who only watch for scheduled releases.

Which holiday has caught the most traders off guard in your experience?

[Amanhasnoname]

For me it was a UK bank holiday Monday a couple of years back. I'd forgotten about it completely, sat down at the usual time and started trading GBPUSD as if it were a normal London morning. The chart looked perfectly ordinary, but my fills were poor and two quick fades went straight through my stops on moves that came out of nowhere. I only realised afterwards when I wondered why the forum was so quiet.

The thing you say about holidays hiding as all day entries is spot on. My platform's calendar showed it as a tiny flag with no time attached, and I only ever filtered for high impact events, so it never appeared on my screen.

Now I keep a plain text file with the holidays for the four currencies I trade, filled in for the whole year each January. Every Sunday I read the coming week's lines, and on any day where London or New York is shut I either halve my size or take the day off completely.