The currency market closes on Friday evening and reopens on Sunday evening. Nothing trades for roughly 48 hours. But news does not stop — elections, central-bank comments, geopolitical events all happen at weekends — and when the market reopens, the first price can be a long way from the last one. That jump is the weekend gap.
What a gap looks like
EUR/USD closes on Friday at 1.0850. Over the weekend a surprise result in a European election unsettles investors. On Sunday at 21:00 GMT the first quote is 1.0790. There was no 1.0840, no 1.0820, no 1.0800: the price went from 1.0850 to 1.0790 in a single step. On a chart it is a visible hole between Friday's candle and Monday's.
Most weekends the gap is small — a few pips, the result of ordinary news flow and thin early-Sunday liquidity. A few times a year it is large. Gaps of 100–200 pips on majors have happened after referendums, surprise policy moves and weekend crises, and gold has opened 2–3% away from its Friday close on more than one occasion.
Why gaps are dangerous
A stop-loss is an instruction to close a position at a given price. It can only be executed at a price that actually trades. If your stop is at 1.0820 and the first available price on Sunday is 1.0790, the stop executes at 1.0790 — 30 pips worse than planned. The protection you thought you had was only as good as the market's continuity, and over a weekend there is none.
For a copied trade the arithmetic is the same. A master's stop that would have cost 1% on a weekday can cost 2% or 3% across a gap. It does not happen often; when it does, it tends to happen to everyone at once.
The platform's weekly break
IDTraders handles this with a rule rather than a hope. Non-crypto instruments have a weekly break from Friday 22:00 GMT to Sunday 22:00 GMT — the exact times are shown on Market hours and are set by the platform. During the break:
- No new positions in forex, metals or indices can be opened.
- Existing positions cannot be closed or edited (there is no price to close at).
- The stop-out engine, which checks margin every 15 seconds during trading hours, resumes at the reopen and evaluates every position against the first real price.
The break does not make gaps disappear. What it does is make the situation honest: nobody is shown a price that does not exist, nobody's stop is "filled" at a phantom level, and everyone's position is marked at the same real opening price. It also removes the temptation, common on some platforms, to open a trade at 21:30 on a Friday and hope.
How masters handle weekends
Looking at a master's Recent Trades will show you their weekend policy without them having to state it:
- Flat by Friday. Every position closed before the break. No gap risk, but no chance of a favourable gap either, and a habit of closing good trades early.
- Holds through, reduced size. Common among swing traders. The gap risk is accepted on smaller positions.
- Holds through at full size. Higher return in trending markets; the drawdown figure will show what a bad weekend cost.
None is wrong. A copier should simply know which one they are copying, because a Sunday-evening jump in equity is either an event to expect or a surprise, depending on the master's style.
Crypto is different
Bitcoin, Ether and the other crypto pairs never close. There is no weekend gap because there is no weekend — the price prints through Saturday and Sunday, and the stop-out engine keeps running. What changes is liquidity: weekend crypto volume is thinner, and moves can be sharper for it. A crypto master's weekend trades are visible on the Live prices page in real time, gap-free but not risk-free.
Gaps that fill, and gaps that do not
An old trading saying is that "gaps get filled" — that the price tends to return to Friday's close within days. It is true often enough to be tempting and false often enough to be expensive. Gaps caused by thin Sunday liquidity, with no real news behind them, do tend to fill quickly as normal volume returns on Monday. Gaps caused by genuine news — an election, a policy change — represent a real repricing and can extend for weeks rather than fill. The difference is whether something actually changed over the weekend, and that is a judgement about the news, not the chart. Masters who mechanically fade every Sunday gap have a strategy that works most weekends and loses badly on the few that matter; their drawdown will contain those few.
What to do
If you follow a forex or gold master who holds through weekends, check the calendar on Friday for anything scheduled — an election, a summit, a central-bank event — that could land while the market is shut. If something large is due, expect Sunday evening to be eventful. That is the whole preparation; the master decides the position, the platform applies the rule, and the reopen tells everyone the truth at the same time.
A gap is the market catching up on two days of news in one tick. The weekly break does not stop gaps; it stops anyone pretending they are not there.
This article is education, not investment advice. Trading and copy trading in leveraged instruments carry a high risk of losing the funds you allocate. Read the Risk Disclosure.