Monday and Friday are different markets

[Fairman]

Monday and Friday are different markets

Monday morning begins with a market digesting the weekend. Positions are fresh, gaps may need to be absorbed, and the first hours are often hesitant and range-bound.

Friday is the opposite. Positions are being squared, activity fades in the afternoon, and moves can be odd and one-sided.

Many scalpers notice these differences in their journals. Win rates, average ranges, and the frequency of false breakouts vary by weekday. Midweek, Tuesday through Thursday, tends to be the most productive, with the cleanest structure and the most reliable follow-through.

It is not a law, and individual weeks break the pattern. But splitting results by weekday and examining each is cheap and sometimes revealing.

A trader who finds Mondays and Fridays unprofitable has an easy decision: trade less or not at all on those days. It reduces effort and costs without hurting the bottom line.

A simple trick is a weekday column in the journal, with a pivot table of net result per weekday. Four weeks is too few, but six months starts to say something.

Which weekday is the strongest in the journal, and which is the weakest?