What Happens to Your Trades Over a Weekend

The market closes; your position does not

Spot forex stops quoting late on Friday and starts again late on Sunday, at times set by your broker's server clock. Between those two moments there is no price feed, no execution and no way to close, adjust or hedge anything. Stops and limits sit inert on the server. Whatever the account holds on Friday evening, it holds until the reopen.

Prices carry on without you

Currencies do not stop reacting to the world for two days. Elections, central bank statements, geopolitical events and weekend policy announcements all land while the market is shut, and their effect arrives as a single movement at the open rather than as a gradual drift. That movement is a gap: the first price of the new week is simply a different number from the last price of the old one.

A gap matters most for orders resting inside it. A stop-loss is an instruction to close at the next available price, not a promise of the level written on it. If the market reopens beyond your stop, the stop fills at the reopening price and the loss is larger than the one you sized for. Guaranteed stops, where a broker offers them, are the product that removes that specific risk, and they are sold at a premium.

Financing does not take the weekend off

Positions held overnight are financed on every calendar day, weekends included. Most brokers apply the weekend's financing on one weekday — commonly Wednesday for spot FX, following the settlement convention — so a single rollover charges around three days at once. If you plan to carry a position across a weekend, read the swap lines for that instrument first. The number is small per night and easy to underestimate over a month.

The thin hours on either side

Liquidity drains before the Friday close and returns unevenly after the Sunday open. Spreads widen in both windows, and an order placed there can fill further from the requested price than the same order would mid-session. Automated strategies that trade to a schedule are especially exposed: they can fire into the widest spread of the week without registering that anything is unusual.

What you can actually control

Three things, none of them exotic. Size: a position that is comfortable intraday is a different proposition if it reopens several times its stop distance away, so weekend exposure is a sizing decision taken before Friday, not a reaction on Sunday. Times: know your broker's exact close and open in server time, because a public holiday or a daylight-saving change moves both. Calendar: check whether anything scheduled — a vote, a summit, a policy meeting — falls while the market is shut, and treat the reopen as an unknown price rather than a continuation of Friday's chart.

What none of this prevents

Nothing here removes gap risk; it is a feature of a market that closes. Negative balance protection, where your account carries it, limits the worst case to the funds you deposited rather than beyond them, but it is a backstop against catastrophe, not a substitute for position size. Deciding what you are willing to be holding when the screen goes quiet is the one measure that applies to every risk on this page at once.