How to journal weekend gaps and the Monday open

A Friday close note, a Monday open note and two tags that show how you really handle the longest closure of the week.

The weekend is the longest stretch in the week when the market is closed to you but the world is not. News arrives on Saturday and Sunday, and when trading resumes the price can start the week away from where it closed on Friday. For anyone holding a trade through the weekend, or planning to trade the first hours of the week, the gap is a situation worth writing rules for. This page covers what to note before the weekend and after the open, and what a journal can show about your weekend habits.

What a gap means for your trade

A gap happens when the first price after a closure is different from the last price before it. If a stop-loss order sits inside the gap, it cannot be filled at the stop price because that price never traded. It is usually filled at the first available price after the open, which can be worse than the stop. How a broker handles this depends on its execution model and terms, so read your broker’s documents instead of assuming. The page on spread and slippage in the trade history explains how to compare an exit with the price you intended.

Note that the app reads the closed position, so the exit price and result are those your broker reported. It does not store your intended price, so if you want to compare a stop level with a gap fill, write the intended level in the notes.

Know your own market’s weekly schedule

MetaTrader 5 shows the trading sessions for a symbol in its specification. The page on the symbol specification window shows where. Broker server time may not match your own clock, so see server time explained.

A Friday close note

Before you finish on Friday, write one entry in your notes or a daily note, with three lines:

• Held over the weekend? Which positions, how large, and where the stops are.
• Why? A plain reason, such as “the setup was still valid”, or an honest “I did not want to take the loss”. The second answer is the useful one.
• Risk if it gaps? How much you would lose if the market opened a set distance beyond your stop. A written figure keeps you honest.

Positions held over a weekend also carry swap, which can be charged at a multiple on one day of the week depending on the instrument. See the page on swap in MT5 for how to read it in your history.

A Monday open note

• What changed since Friday? One sentence on any news or price difference.
• Rule for the first hour. Stay out, trade a named setup with reduced size, or follow your normal plan.
• Spread check. Spreads are often wider right after the open, so note whether you waited for them to settle.

Compare this with how you handle holiday and thin liquidity days, where the same worry about wide spreads applies.

Tagging and filters

Tag trades that were held over a weekend weekend-hold and trades opened in the first hour after the weekly open monday-open. Because the journal dates an entry by its last exit, a trade held over a weekend appears on the day it closed. The tag is what lets you find it later.

What to review

After a couple of months, filter each tag and compare the figures with your other trades: average result, average rating, share that followed the plan, and the size of the largest loss. Pay attention to the largest loss. A weekend-hold group with a typical result but one loss several times larger than average is a risk pattern, and that is exactly the kind of thing a journal is for. The holding time analysis shows how to look at long trades in general.

A worked example (hypothetical)

A trader holds 9 trades over weekends in a quarter and opens 14 in the first hour of the week. The weekend holds average a small positive result, but one of them closed with a loss five times the usual loss because the stop was filled after a gap. The Monday-open trades have a plan-following rate of 50 percent, against 78 percent for other hours. The two findings lead to two rules: a smaller size for anything held over a weekend, and a 30-minute wait before the first trade of the week. The following quarter’s tags show whether the rules were kept. The numbers are invented for illustration.

Where a journal fits

AI Trading Journal reads closed positions from MetaTrader 5, combines profit, commission and swap, merges partial closes and dates each entry by its last exit on the broker’s clock. You add the weekend tags, notes and ratings, and filter later. It is read-only, runs on Windows for MT5 only, and the journal is a file on your own PC. There is a free 7-day trial on the buy page.

Limits of this page

• Weekly open and close times and gap handling are broker-specific; confirm them with your broker.
• The example numbers are hypothetical.
• The app does not record intended prices, slippage or floating profit on open trades.
• Nothing here is advice on whether to hold a trade over a weekend.

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