Forex Weekend Gaps: What Happens When the Market Reopens
A forex weekend gap is the jump between Friday's close and the Sunday open. Learn why gaps happen, how stops fill in them and how to size weekend trades.
You close the laptop on Friday with a stop loss 40 pips away. On Monday the trade has been closed 75 pips lower, and nobody seems to have broken a rule. The forex weekend gap is the reason, and it behaves in ways you can plan for.
Quick answer: A forex weekend gap is the price jump between Friday’s close, around 22:00 UK time, and the first price when trading resumes on Sunday, also around 22:00 UK. News over the weekend moves the opening price. Stops inside the gap are filled at the first available price, so the loss can be larger than planned.
What is a forex weekend gap?
Forex trades around the clock from Monday morning in New Zealand to Friday evening in New York. Between those two points prices move continuously: each new quote is a small step from the last. At the weekend, the dealing banks stop quoting and retail platforms stop accepting orders on most instruments. The world does not stop with them. When quotes start again, the first price reflects everything that happened while the market was shut, and it may be some distance from where Friday ended.
That distance is the weekend gap. On a chart it shows as empty space between the last candle on Friday and the first on Monday. A gap up opens above Friday’s close; a gap down opens below it. No trading took place at any price inside the gap, which is what makes it dangerous for orders that were waiting there.
Most weekends the gap on a major pair is small, often a few pips, and on some charts it is invisible because the platform draws Monday’s first candle right next to Friday’s last. Every so often it is large. After the first round of the French presidential election in April 2017, for example, EUR/USD opened the new week well over 100 pips above its Friday close. Gaps also appear in the true range behind volatility indicators, which is why our guide to the ATR indicator counts them.
When the forex market closes and reopens, in UK and Iran time
The forex week is anchored to New York. Trading ends at 17:00 New York time on Friday and resumes at 17:00 New York time on Sunday, when Wellington and Sydney start their Monday morning. For most of the year that is 22:00 UK time on Friday and Sunday.
Iran has kept the same clock all year since Iran stopped using daylight saving time in 2022, at UTC+3:30. Because the forex week follows New York, the Iran time changes when the US changes its clocks:
| US summer time (mid-March to early November) | US winter time (early November to mid-March) | |
|---|---|---|
| Market closes | Friday 22:00 UK, Saturday 00:30 Iran | Friday 22:00 UK, Saturday 01:30 Iran |
| Market reopens | Sunday 22:00 UK, Monday 00:30 Iran | Sunday 22:00 UK, Monday 01:30 Iran |
For a reader in Iran, the forex weekend covers Saturday and Sunday, which are ordinary working days there, and the market is open on Friday, the local day off, until after midnight. For a few weeks in March and around the end of October, the US and UK change clocks on different dates, and the UK times move to 21:00 while the Iran times stay as in the summer column.
Platforms add their own details. Many show server time, often two or three hours ahead of UK time, so the open can appear as midnight on your chart. Some brokers start quoting a few minutes after 17:00 New York, and some close a few minutes early on Friday. Gold, oil and index CFDs follow their own markets: they usually close for the weekend at a similar time on Friday and often reopen an hour or so later on Sunday evening than currencies, with short daily breaks during the week. Check your platform’s trading hours for each instrument. The session clock below shows the four main sessions in your own time zone, and our guide to forex market hours covers the weekday sessions.
Open now: …
The four forex sessions in your own time zone. The week starts when Sydney opens on Monday morning local time, which is Sunday evening in London and after midnight on Monday in Iran.
Why weekend gaps happen
A gap needs two ingredients: new information, and no market in which to trade it.
The information builds up for two days. Elections and referendums are often held at weekends. Finance ministers meet, governments announce measures, central bank officials give interviews, and conflicts do not pause for the forex calendar. For oil, producer group meetings sometimes fall on a weekend. None of this can be traded until Sunday evening, so the whole reaction arrives in the first price instead of being spread over hours of trading.
The second ingredient is thin liquidity at the open. The first hours belong to Wellington and Sydney, the smallest sessions of the week. Fewer banks are quoting, and those that are quote wider prices to protect themselves from news they may not have fully priced. Your broker passes those wider prices on as a wider spread, often several times its normal level for the first few minutes, before it narrows as Tokyo and then London join.
The combination explains why gaps are larger on some instruments than others. Exotic pairs, crosses with thin weekend interest and markets tied to a single country’s politics gap more readily than EUR/USD. Gold and oil can gap sharply on geopolitical news. A stock index can gap because of results or announcements from companies inside it, which forex does not have.
How stops behave in a weekend gap
A stop loss is a stop order: an instruction to close the trade with a market order once price reaches a level. It does not reserve that price. In a gap, the price never trades at your level, so the order is triggered by the first quote beyond it and filled there, or at the next available price after that. The difference between your level and the fill is slippage.
Step through the chart below to see it happen on an illustrative EUR/USD hourly chart.
Illustrative EUR/USD hourly chart across a weekend. A long trade's stop at 1.1640 sits inside a 67-pip gap, so it fills at Monday's opening price of 1.1605: a 75-pip loss instead of 40. The gap later fills only partly.
The same mechanics apply to every order type, with different results.
- Stop loss and sell stop or buy stop entries become market orders when triggered. In a gap they fill at the first available price, which can be much worse than the level you set. A pending buy stop above Friday’s close can open you into a trade far above your intended entry, already some way from your planned stop.
- Take profit and other limit orders fill at your price or better. If the market gaps through your take profit in your favour, most execution policies give you the better opening price. Read your broker’s policy to be sure.
- Stop-limit orders set a worst acceptable price. In a gap beyond that limit they may not fill at all, leaving the position open while price runs further away.
The simulator shows the difference between order types in a calm market and in a fast one, which is the same problem in a milder form. The Academy lessons on order types and execution and slippage go further.
Illustrative. Market and stop orders fill at the next available price, which in fast markets can be several pips away. Limit orders fill at your price or better, or not at all.
The stop out is a market order too
If the gap is large enough, the broker’s automatic close-out can also be triggered at the open. It is filled the same way, at the first available price, which can leave the account far below the 50% line. Our guide to margin call and stop out shows how close a heavily sized account sits to that line. Retail clients of UK and EU regulated firms cannot be left with a negative balance, under rules the FCA made permanent in 2019 (FCA PS19/18); our guide to negative balance protection explains where that protection stops.
Gap fill myths
Spend an hour on trading forums and you will read that “gaps always fill”: price returns to Friday’s close sooner or later, so a gap is a free signal to trade back towards it. The idea is attractive and it has some truth in it. Many small weekend gaps on major pairs are revisited within a day or two, because the first quotes on Sunday are thin and later prices from deeper markets often settle somewhere between.
The trouble is in the word “always”. Three outcomes are possible, and only one of them suits the trade.
No published rule says how often weekend gaps fill, and the share depends on the pair, the size of the gap, the period you measure and what you call a “fill”. Large gaps caused by real news are the ones least likely to close quickly, because the news has changed what the currency is worth. Memory adds a bias: a gap that filled by Monday lunchtime makes a good story, while the one that never came back is quietly forgotten.
If you want to trade gaps, treat the idea like any other strategy. Define the gap size, the entry, the stop and the exit in advance, test the rules on several years of data, and record every result, including the losers. Until you have done that, “gaps fill” is a pattern you have heard about, not an edge you have measured.
Holding trades over the weekend
Holding over a weekend is a normal part of swing and position trading, and it can be done with the risk known in advance. Four decisions matter.
Size for the gap, not only for the stop
Your stop sets the loss you plan for. The gap sets the loss you could take. If you normally risk 1% between entry and stop, a weekend position can lose more than 1% when the stop fills in a gap. The simplest control is to hold smaller over the weekend: half your normal size, for example, means a gap that doubles the planned loss still costs only about your usual 1%. The position sizing lesson shows the basic calculation.
Put the stop where the idea fails
Moving your stop closer on a Friday to “protect” the trade does not reduce gap risk; a gap jumps a near stop as easily as a far one, and a tight stop is also more likely to be hit by Friday’s last wobbles. Keep the stop where the chart says the trade is wrong, as taught in the stop-loss placement lesson, and reduce the size if the total risk is too much.
Check the weekend’s news
Before Friday’s close, look ahead. Is there an election, a referendum, a summit or a scheduled statement over the weekend? An economic calendar lists many of these events. For a known event, closing or reducing the position on Friday is a reasonable choice, and so is not opening a new trade on Friday afternoon at all. Unscheduled news cannot be checked, which is the reason to size for it.
Use a guaranteed stop where it is offered
Some CFD providers offer a guaranteed stop loss, which closes the trade at exactly your level, gap or no gap. The cost is a premium, usually charged only if the stop is triggered, and there are conditions: a minimum distance from the current price, limits on moving it, and availability only on some markets and account types. They are often unavailable on forex accounts, including MetaTrader accounts at many providers. Where you can use one, it turns the weekend gap from an unknown loss into a known cost. Our guide to slippage compares guaranteed stops with ordinary ones in more detail.
Or close on Friday
Closing everything before the weekend removes gap risk completely, and for day traders and short-term swing traders it is often the simplest rule. It has costs of its own. You pay the spread again to reopen on Monday, and you reopen at a different price, sometimes a worse one. A gap in your favour is missed as surely as a gap against you. And a trade idea built on a daily or weekly chart may need more than five days to play out, so a rule that always closes on Friday can cut good trades short.
A middle path is to decide trade by trade on Friday afternoon: close or reduce positions that are near their stop or exposed to a known weekend event, and hold the rest at a size whose worst plausible gap you can accept. Whichever rule you pick, write it into your trading plan so the decision is made before Friday, not during it.
Two smaller points apply too. Leave more free margin than usual over the weekend, because some brokers raise margin requirements before weekends or major events, and a gap can push a thin account straight into a stop out. And remember the weekend’s financing: on forex the triple swap usually falls on Wednesday night, so holding through Saturday and Sunday adds no extra swap, but many index and commodity CFDs charge the weekend’s three nights on Friday. Our guides to forex swap and to what a CFD is cover the charges.
Common weekend gap mistakes
Believing a stop loss caps the loss
A stop caps the loss only when the market trades at the stop price. Across a weekend, it is a request to exit at the first price available on Sunday evening.
Trading the Sunday open with market orders
The first minutes after the reopen carry the widest spreads of the week and thin prices. A market order sent at 22:01 UK time can fill far from the price you see a few minutes later. If you need to act, wait until spreads have settled.
Fading every gap
A gap is a fact about the open, not a forecast of the next move. Treating “gaps fill” as a rule without testing it adds a second risk to the first.
Holding full size into a known event
If you know an election result will arrive on Sunday, a full-sized position is a bet on the result with an exit you do not control. Reduce it, close it, or accept the larger possible loss in advance.
Forgetting different instruments keep different hours
Gold, oil and index CFDs do not reopen at the same moment as EUR/USD, and some close earlier on Friday. A stop on one may be live while the other is still shut. Check the trading hours for each market you hold. The Academy lesson on market sessions shows the weekly timetable, and the Gold, Oil and Indices course covers the other markets.
Frequently asked questions
What time does the forex market close on Friday?
Forex closes at 17:00 New York time on Friday, which is 22:00 UK time for most of the year. In Iran, which does not change its clocks, that is 00:30 on Saturday while the US is on summer time and 01:30 on Saturday in the US winter. Brokers may close a few minutes earlier, so check your platform.
What is a weekend gap in forex?
A weekend gap is the difference between Friday's closing price and the first price when trading resumes on Sunday evening. News that breaks while the market is closed is priced in at once, so the market can open above or below Friday's close with no trading in between.
Will my stop loss work over the weekend?
Your stop stays active, but it cannot fill at a price that never trades. If the market opens beyond your stop, the stop triggers at the first available price and fills there, so the loss can be larger than you planned. Only a guaranteed stop, where offered, closes at exactly your level.
Do forex weekend gaps always fill?
No. Many small gaps on major pairs are revisited within a day or two, but some fill only weeks later and some never fill, especially when real news caused them. There is no reliable rule for how often gaps fill, so any gap strategy needs to be tested on years of data first.
Should I close my trades before the weekend?
It depends on your strategy and the size of the position. Swing traders often hold over weekends, accepting gap risk. If you hold, size the trade so that a gap through the stop would still be an acceptable loss, check the weekend's scheduled events, and consider a guaranteed stop where one is available.
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