Where does the Sunday candle go? Brokers handle it three different ways
Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2026 7:16 pm
Open a daily chart on a few different platforms and the Sunday evening bar is the first thing that stops matching. Some show it as a stub candle a few pips tall. Some fold it into Monday. Some tuck it into Friday's bar by shifting the server clock so the week starts on a different day.
None of those choices is wrong, but each one changes the numbers that daily-based tools spit out.
Stub candles are the honest version. The market opened, traded thinly for a few hours before Asia woke up, and the platform drew exactly that. The side effect is a daily range of five or six bars a week instead of five, and an average daily range indicator that drags down every time a stub gets counted as a full day.
Merged candles are the tidy version. The Sunday ticks are appended to Monday, which keeps the count at five bars a week. The catch is that Monday's open now sits at the Sunday open, so a weekend gap quietly disappears into the first bar instead of showing as a gap between Friday's close and Monday's open.
Shifted-clock candles are the awkward version. The server time zone is set so that the daily bar rolls at a New York close, and Sunday trading lands inside Monday's bar by construction. Anything that references the daily open, such as pivot levels or a daily open line, then depends entirely on that offset.
Practical consequence: a level marked from the daily open on one platform can sit in a different place on another platform, even with identical price data underneath. Gap-based setups depend on this more than anything else.
Which treatment does your platform use for the Sunday bar, and has it ever thrown off a daily open level you were relying on?
None of those choices is wrong, but each one changes the numbers that daily-based tools spit out.
Stub candles are the honest version. The market opened, traded thinly for a few hours before Asia woke up, and the platform drew exactly that. The side effect is a daily range of five or six bars a week instead of five, and an average daily range indicator that drags down every time a stub gets counted as a full day.
Merged candles are the tidy version. The Sunday ticks are appended to Monday, which keeps the count at five bars a week. The catch is that Monday's open now sits at the Sunday open, so a weekend gap quietly disappears into the first bar instead of showing as a gap between Friday's close and Monday's open.
Shifted-clock candles are the awkward version. The server time zone is set so that the daily bar rolls at a New York close, and Sunday trading lands inside Monday's bar by construction. Anything that references the daily open, such as pivot levels or a daily open line, then depends entirely on that offset.
Practical consequence: a level marked from the daily open on one platform can sit in a different place on another platform, even with identical price data underneath. Gap-based setups depend on this more than anything else.
Which treatment does your platform use for the Sunday bar, and has it ever thrown off a daily open level you were relying on?