Every year I forget the markets are closed on Good Friday. So of course I'm ready to rock & roll and..nothing I forgot again this year..good grief. I'm not into Religion so I have no idea why the markets are closed for this Religious custom. But alas! Running my new Ninja toy, I just found an indicator for people like me. I never use indicators, but I might try this one. The indicator is called Holiday Tomorrow Indicator that informs you of a pending Holiday/market closure. https://ninjatraderecosystem.com/user-app-share-download/holiday-tomorrow-indicator/
You should be aware of all holidays, early close days, and all days when big market moving news events are due (FOMC, ECB, NFP, and more recently CPI etc) At the start of the year i typically make a calendar for the year with the date for all these events. In my early days i used to get caught out a lot more. Back in late 2009 i was once short over 30 large DAX contracts as a day trade and the DAX futures market closed early with me still holding the short position. I had to go and hedge with eurostoxx futures which were still trading.
That is a very useful indicator. It would be better however if the indicator can show up few days earlier to inform of an upcoming market-closing holiday instead of just on the day before so traders can have more time to plan their trading, imo. Quite honestly, there should be no market-closing holidays. If businesses never rest, the financial markets that move their money shouldn't rest either. From a profit point of view, market-closing holidays are like forced pay cuts for traders. If I really want to take a vacation, I can plan my own vacation holidays myself. Now I can't unless I want to take further pay cuts. I have to cater my life, my profitability to these holidays that are based on a religion that I neither worship nor believe in. If you run any other kind of business, you can choose to stay open during these holidays if you want and choose your own vacation days to close your shop but we traders who are businessmen just like any other businesses, have to be forced to close our business according to schedules forced upon us. And yet if you compare us to people who work for others, they get paid for taking the days off on these holidays and yet we as traders don't get paid so we lose out again. We get the worst of both worlds. It's really not fair and it gets a little annoying at times.
Federal/banking holidays are ingrained in my brain. I wasn't really thinking about Easter, but I realized by Tuesday that the markets would be closed and planned my trades accordingly. There's really not enough holidays to warrant an app, just get a calendar and try to remember that Easter is right up there with Christmas to Christian folks.
If i get a dollar for each time that newbs (including me) terorized brokers etc. during saturdays, with questions like ,,Why the platform is not working ?" They should come up with commisions for questions like that. HOOD rev would skyrocket.
Here's another indicator many find useful for seeing upcoming events that move markets on your chart. It can be filtered to specific currencies and expected market impact: https://ninjatraderecosystem.com/user-app-share-download/jteconnews2a/ The data comes from https://www.forexfactory.com/calendar
I usually am the last to know when there is a holiday. I often find out the hard way because the Montreal Derivatives Exchange likes to find any and every stupid reason possible to shut down the exchange. This leaves me to wonder why the fuck my options chain is not updating for the first half hour. They just love it when the Canadian liberal government keeps adding more Monday holidays for its government workers. That said, THIS time I was prepared. I noticed the DTE on my contracts were coming up one day short of Friday. So I closed out my contracts proper the last 30 minutes on Thursday