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Monday open execution is its own animal

The first minutes after the weekend gap play by different rules. Spreads are wide, the platform feeds may lag as the connections come back, and some brokers do not fill pending orders at the price specified but at the first available price after the gap.

A buy stop set at 1.0850 when the market opens at 1.0880 fills at 1.0880, not 1.0850. The platform reports it as normal. The slippage is the gap itself.

Scalpers sometimes make the mistake of leaving orders over the weekend because "they will trigger on a pullback anyway". On Monday they trigger on a gap, at the worst price of the week, with a spread that is three times normal.

Also worth knowing: the first quote of the week often comes from a single liquidity source, and the pricing relative to the rest of the market can be off for a couple of minutes. Some of the strangest wicks on weekly charts come from exactly that.

Standard advice here is to wait. For scalpers the standard advice is not necessarily wrong, it is just boring and cheap.

What is the earliest time after the open that spreads settle down on the pairs being traded, measured rather than guessed?

The first few minutes after the weekly open on Sunday are not simply "Monday early." The behavior is quite different.

Liquidity is thin because only a handful of participants are present: early Wellington desks, some Asian banks, a few retail brokers pushing prices out. Spreads are enormous, sometimes ten times the regular size, and they compress slowly over the following hour.

Quotes often arrive as the broker's first attempt to reflect weekend news. A gap of fifty pips can print and half of it may vanish within minutes as real liquidity shows up and corrects the price. Pending orders left over the weekend get filled at the worst moment, with slippage that looks nothing like the usual.

For scalpers the Sunday open is a poor place to find clean fills. The tick data looks tempting, with big moves and rapid action, but the cost of getting in and out can swallow the move entirely.

A lot of experienced scalpers simply wait until spreads normalize, which tends to be well into the Asian session.

How long does it take for spreads to settle on your usual pair after the Sunday open?