Christmas week and US holidays: thin does not mean quiet
Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2026 7:48 am
On a US bank holiday or the days between Christmas and New Year, volume drops and a lot of scalpers assume that means calm, tight ranges and easy mean reversion. Sometimes it does. The risk is that thin books produce sudden jumps on small orders, and the spread can stay wider than usual for long stretches even though the chart looks sleepy.
A few mechanisms worth knowing about. Liquidity providers in New York are absent or reduced, so the afternoon liquidity that normally supports the London to New York overlap just is not there. Spread on majors may sit at 1.5 to 2 pips instead of 0.6 for hours. A single sizeable order can move price 8 pips with no follow-through. And stop runs look more dramatic because there is less resting liquidity to absorb them.
The numbers are easy to check. Take the last Thanksgiving Friday, or the days around 24 to 31 December, and compare average spread and average range against a normal week. If ratio of spread to range worsens, the same strategy has a worse edge even if it is mathematically identical.
Reduced size, wider stops or simply sitting out are all reasonable. Forcing a normal trade count on a holiday week is where many scalpers give back a month of gains.
What does your account look like during the holiday weeks, and do you trade normal size or cut it?
A few mechanisms worth knowing about. Liquidity providers in New York are absent or reduced, so the afternoon liquidity that normally supports the London to New York overlap just is not there. Spread on majors may sit at 1.5 to 2 pips instead of 0.6 for hours. A single sizeable order can move price 8 pips with no follow-through. And stop runs look more dramatic because there is less resting liquidity to absorb them.
The numbers are easy to check. Take the last Thanksgiving Friday, or the days around 24 to 31 December, and compare average spread and average range against a normal week. If ratio of spread to range worsens, the same strategy has a worse edge even if it is mathematically identical.
Reduced size, wider stops or simply sitting out are all reasonable. Forcing a normal trade count on a holiday week is where many scalpers give back a month of gains.
What does your account look like during the holiday weeks, and do you trade normal size or cut it?