How to journal holiday and thin-liquidity trading days

A pre-day plan, one consistent tag and a simple comparison to learn whether quiet days change your trading.

Some of the most awkward trading days are the ones when little happens: a US holiday, the afternoon before a long weekend, the last week of December. Markets do not stop, but liquidity thins, spreads can widen, charts look strange, and traders who cannot help being active tend to make decisions they would not make on a normal Tuesday. This page is about journaling those days on purpose, so that you can see whether your results change when the market is quiet. It gives a short plan, the fields to record and a way to compare holiday days with ordinary ones.

What changes on a holiday or thin day

When a large market is closed for a holiday, fewer participants quote prices. Brokers also publish their own holiday schedules: symbols may close early, have a long break or stop trading altogether, and swap or margin rules may change. The exact treatment is the broker’s decision, so the reliable source is the symbol specification in your terminal and the broker’s holiday notice, not a general article. What you can say in general is that conditions differ, and your journal should make that visible.

For swap, which can be charged at a multiple on certain days, see MT5 swap explained. Do not assume a holiday follows the usual pattern; read your history afterwards.

The behaviour problem is bigger than the market problem

On a quiet day the biggest risk is often not the market but boredom. With no news, a trader who is used to action looks for a setup that is not there, widens a stop out of habit, or trades a larger size to make the day worth it. The pattern is well known, and it is just as well known that people deny it about themselves. A journal replaces the denial with evidence. If your holiday-day trades are consistently below your own rating average, you want to see that in numbers, not in a feeling.

A short plan to write before the day

• Will I trade at all? Choosing to stay flat is a legitimate plan. Write it down, so staying flat counts as following the plan.
• What will I not do? For example no new positions in the last two hours before a market close, or no larger size to compensate for a slow day.
• Where are the risks? Open positions that will pass through a break or a swap rollover, and stops that sit near levels a wide spread could reach.
• When do I stop? A maximum number of trades or a loss limit for the day. The Progress page in AI Trading Journal stores a monthly profit target and loss limit if you want a number to measure against; see how to set monthly trading goals.

What to log on the entries

Nothing special is needed beyond your normal fields: setup, emotion, plan followed, a 1 to 5 rating, tags and notes. What matters is one consistent tag, for example thin-day, plus an emotion label such as “bored” when it is true. If a fill looked odd, add a sentence. AI Trading Journal records closed positions from MetaTrader 5 and does not capture intended prices or slippage, so that sentence is how the difference between plan and fill enters the record. The method for tags is in how to tag trades, and the emotion field is discussed in the trading psychology journal guide.

How to review

After a quarter, filter the tag and look at four figures: the number of trades per thin day, the share that followed the plan, the average rating and the net result. Compare them with all your other days, using at least 20 or 30 trades on each side before reading anything into the difference. If you made more trades on thin days than on normal ones, that is already a finding, whatever the profit says. Our page on overtrading explains how to measure trade count against rules.

A worked example (hypothetical)

Over a year a trader tags 12 thin days. On normal days the average is 3 trades, 80 percent following the plan. On the tagged days the average is 5 trades, 55 percent following the plan, and the net result is negative on 8 of the 12. The sample is small and could be chance, but the trade count and the plan score point in the same direction. The trader writes a rule for the next holiday: a limit of 2 trades, and a break at the first plan violation. The next year’s tagged days show whether the rule helped.

Limits of this page

• Market holidays and broker schedules differ by country, exchange and broker. Check the broker’s own notice for each date.
• The example numbers are hypothetical, and a small sample cannot prove anything.
• AI Trading Journal does not record spreads, slippage or intended prices; it reads closed positions from MetaTrader 5 and you add notes.
• This is not trading advice.

For a review rhythm that covers every day, see the end-of-day review template and the weekly review checklist.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• A local trading journal for MT5
• P&L calendar for MT5
• Trade notes, ratings and screenshots
• Trading progress and goals
• Back up your journal and move it to a new PC
• An offline trading journal for Windows
• How to set monthly trading goals
• Import your whole MT5 history
• How to tag trades
• Trade screenshots for your journal
• All trading journal comparisons