Forex trading over Christmas and New Year: the hours that matter for your bot

Forex trading over Christmas and New Year in 2026 means your bot runs into two holes in the calendar. The market is shut on Friday 25 December and Friday 1 January, and a weekend follows each time. The real risk sits in a handful of hours around those closures: the evenings of 24 and 31 December, the Sunday reopenings on 27 December and 3 January, and the night of 30 into 31 December, when Tokyo is closed. That is when spreads are widest and order books thinnest. The rest of the fortnight is just a quiet market.

The quiet part is covered in our piece on low liquidity in August. This one is about the calendar, and about one night in January 2019 that shows what can happen in an hour like that.

Forex trading over Christmas and New Year: the calendar day by day

Christmas Day and New Year's Day both fall on a Friday this year. The upshot: the market is shut twice for three days in a row, from 22:00 UK time on Thursday until around 22:00 on Sunday. Whatever your bot holds on Thursday night sits there for three days without a single new price.

Other countries make it messier. Boxing Day is a Saturday, so the UK bank holiday moves to Monday 28 December. Australia and New Zealand do the same, which means London, Sydney and Wellington are all closed that Monday. The Tokyo exchange shuts on Thursday 31 December and does not reopen until Monday 4 January, according to the JPX holiday calendar. New Zealand takes its day-after-New-Year holiday on that same 4 January.

Your broker has not published 2026 hours yet. That usually happens at the start of December. Last year Vantage looked like this: forex closed on 25 December and 1 January, gold closing early on 24 December at 20:45 server time, which on a GMT+2 server is 18:45 in the UK, and no early close for gold on 31 December. RoboForex did it differently and stopped both forex and gold at 20:00 server time on 24 and 31 December. So the pattern varies by broker. Wait for your own broker's notice rather than assuming it matches someone else's.

Here are the fifteen days in a row, in UK time. Where it says "last year", that is the 2025 pattern, not a confirmed 2026 schedule.

What happened on 3 January 2019?

On Wednesday evening, 2 January 2019, at 22:36 UK time, the yen jumped 3 percent against the dollar in about 30 seconds. In Sydney it was already 9:36 on the morning of 3 January. Within two minutes the Australian dollar had dropped 3 percent against the US dollar to 0.6715, a ten-year low. Against the yen it fell around 7 percent.

Those figures come from the Reserve Bank of Australia's analysis, published a month later. One detail matters most for a bot. The bid-ask spread on dollar-yen went from about 2 pips to between 100 and 300 pips. A stop triggered in those minutes does not fill at your stop price. It fills at whatever happens to be on the other side.

Why then? Wall Street had closed and Apple had cut its revenue guidance after the bell. Japanese banks, which normally absorb a big share of yen trading, were shut for a public holiday. In that gap between New York and Tokyo, Auckland and Sydney were the only centres open. The RBA's explanation is that stop-losses on Japanese retail positions in higher-yielding currencies probably fed the move, along with algorithms that switch off under stress.

Within a few minutes roughly half the move had reversed. Anyone stopped out in those minutes was locked in at the worst price of the night and watched the recovery without a position.

Now put that next to this year. The rollover falls at 22:00 UK time on Wednesday 30 December. What follows is an Asian night with the US closed and Tokyo shut for the whole of Thursday 31 December. Same set-up as 2019: New York shut, Japanese banks shut, and in the first hours after the rollover little more than Auckland and Sydney open.

The five windows where the risk actually sits

Lay the calendar over 2019 and five windows are left. The rest is thin and dull.

On Christmas Eve it starts at 18:00. Wall Street closes then, the US bond market follows at 19:00 and last year Vantage shut gold at 18:45. Forex trades on until the 22:00 rollover, with hardly anyone behind it.

Sunday 27 December around 22:00 is probably the thinnest hour of the whole period. The market reopens after three days, but Sydney and Wellington both have a substitute holiday on Monday and Tokyo only starts at midnight. So the first prices can land well away from Thursday's close. Monday stays lean through the day too, with London shut.

From 22:00 on Wednesday 30 December until Thursday morning runs the night without Tokyo, the 2019 set-up from the previous section.

New Year's Eve only gets interesting after 16:00. That is the London fix, when a lot of year-end orders get executed. At 19:00 the US bond market closes, at 22:00 comes the last rollover of the year and after that it is three days shut again.

On Sunday 3 January the market reopens around 22:00. Sydney works that Monday, Wellington does not, and Tokyo joins at midnight UK time. Two lean hours, though a little less empty than on 27 December.

Nearly all of these windows share the rollover. Every trading day at 22:00 UK time, midnight on the MT5 server, banks close their books and spreads widen. That happens all year. In a thin week there is just less volume to push the spread back in. In broker Fusion Markets' own spread data, the maximum-spread spikes in December follow the same daily rollover rhythm as in September. For what that does to your fills, read our piece on trading bot slippage.

Swap behaves differently too. Wednesday always carries triple swap, and around a holiday some brokers add another day on top. At FXCM that extra day is booked two business days before the holiday. With Christmas and New Year on a Friday, that rule lands on Wednesday 23 and 30 December, the very nights that already carry triple swap. Whether your broker does the same is in its swap calendar.

Should you switch your trading bot off over Christmas?

Not for the whole fortnight. Between 21 December and 4 January there are nine days on which the forex market is open, and most of them are simply quiet. Two weeks off means missing all those ordinary hours.

Look at what your bot does in each window instead. Does it hold positions overnight? Then on 24 and 31 December at 22:00 those go into a three-day weekend, with a reopen you have no say over. A spread filter helps around the rollover, because the bot then refuses trades by itself when the spread blows out. And if it trades fixed hours, check whether they are set in server time, because in winter the server runs two hours ahead of the UK. We went through that in our piece on daylight saving time and your trading bot.

If you do not know the answers, ask whoever built the bot. A provider who knows their own bot can tell you in two sentences what it does at 21:00 on 24 December. If you want to step in yourself, do it in those five windows and leave the rest alone.

With us the bot runs on your own MT5 account, with your own password. We only earn when you win: 30% on winning weeks, and no profit means no commission. A Christmas week in which you make nothing earns us nothing either.

Four more questions about trading between Christmas and New Year

Is the forex market open on Christmas Day and New Year's Day?

No. On Friday 25 December 2026 and Friday 1 January 2027 the major brokers offer no forex trading. Last year Vantage had forex closed on both days. Because both holidays fall on a Friday, the market is shut each time from Thursday 22:00 UK time, or earlier depending on your broker, until around 22:00 on Sunday.

Is Boxing Day a trading day?

Boxing Day falls on a Saturday in 2026, so the question does not come up this year. Monday 28 December is the substitute bank holiday in the UK, and Australia and New Zealand take the day off as well. Forex is open that Monday, just without London.

What was the yen flash crash of 3 January 2019?

Early on 3 January 2019 in Asia, 22:36 on 2 January in London, the yen jumped 3 percent against the dollar in about 30 seconds and the Australian dollar fell around 7 percent against the yen. Japanese banks were closed for a public holiday, and the dollar-yen spread blew out from about 2 pips to between 100 and 300 pips.

When does my broker publish its holiday trading hours?

Usually at the start of December. Vantage put its December 2025 schedule online on 1 December. Until that notice appears, every time for 2026 is an estimate based on last year.