Monday 23 November 2026: Tokyo is on holiday, so what does the Asian session look like?

[Fairman]

Monday 23 November 2026: Tokyo is on holiday, so what does the Asian session look like?

Monday 23 November 2026 is Labour Thanksgiving Day in Japan, a national holiday. The Tokyo Stock Exchange is shut, and so is the Japanese government bond market, and yen settlement shuts too. Japan's holiday calendar fixes it on 23 November every year.

Nothing stops USDJPY from trading. Sydney still opens on Sunday evening and other Asian centres are working. What disappears is the usual Tokyo cash session from 00:00 to 06:30 London time, and with it the flow from Japanese banks and importers that makes many Asian hours look the way they do. So a range or a fix-based setup you rely on from a normal Monday may not behave the same.

Sizing doesn't change much. On a $2,000 account with 1% risk, $20, and a 10 pip stop on USDJPY at 155.00, one pip on one lot is 1,000 yen, or $6.45. The lot size is 20 / (10 x 6.45) = 0.31, which rounds down to 0.3 lots with a risk of $19.35. If the spread is 0.9 pips normally, it costs 0.9 x 6.45 x 0.3 = $1.74, or 0.09R. If it widens to 1.8 pips the cost is $3.48, or 0.18R.

My plan for that day is simple. Trade smaller, check the spread against a cap, and wait for London before expecting a normal flow. It's also a good Monday to review the previous week's trades.

[Fairman]

Which pairs are affected is a fair question. Anything with yen in it loses its home market, so USDJPY, EURJPY, GBPJPY and AUDJPY lose the Tokyo session's participants. AUDUSD and NZDUSD still have Sydney and Wellington, and the Australian and New Zealand calendars are normal on that day. EURUSD in the Asian hours is often quiet anyway. If your strategy works the Asian range on a yen cross, it's the one that is most likely to behave differently, so check how last year's equivalent holiday looked on that pair before trading it at full size.

[Fairman]

You can look at precedents in your own platform. Japanese holidays that fall on Mondays or Fridays are common, for example Marine Day and Sports Day in the previous months. Pull M15 charts for USDJPY on one of those days and on the Monday before it. Measure the range between 00:00 and 07:00 London in both cases, in pips. If the holiday range is 30 pips and the usual one is 45, that's a third smaller, and your usual 15 pip target would be a bigger share of the move. One pair of days is anecdote, but five or six give a rough idea.