The cryptocurrency market is a good example of a market. It’s open around the clock, Monday through Sunday and is closed only when crypto-exchanges shut down for maintenance or an upcoming fork. Crypto-markets are well suited for traders who can only trade on weekends.

Some Forex traders will buy when fundamental or technical factors favor a gap on the next trading day. These traders will place a trade on Friday hold it for the expected news and close it on their favorable moments.

Swing traders and position traders have an advantage over scalpers and day traders since they can use weekends to analyse the market without actually placing trades.

What is weekend market analysis and why should it be done on weekends will be good to know for a trader. As mentioned before periodically practising this market analysis will help definitely.

The reason to do weekend analysis is to approach the next week with a perfect plan. First off, 95% of market analysis is done on the weekend and takes place on the weekly and daily chart time frame. Basically looking for key chart levels of support and resistance, swing highs and lows, event areas and daily chart price action signals . Essentially, you have to do reading the story on the chart and mapping the market from left to right. The points to be noted of what has happened, what is happening and making a final decision of what might happen next (the upcoming week).

You have to know all your key levels drawn in, your bias (bullish or bearish) written out along with the chart condition (uptrend, downtrend, large sideways range or tight / choppy consolidation) as well as taking note of any imminent trade setups that you have to look for.

Weekend gap trading is a popular strategy with foreign exchange, or Forex, traders. While technically open around the clock, Forex trading closes on Friday night and doesn’t reopen until Monday morning Many news announcements and world events that affect currency prices can happen between trading sessions. Weekend gaps which can be seen as occurring within a currency pair at the beginning of the new trading week which starts with Week start opening price , following weekend closing price.

As an example, consider the case where there is a high level meeting between the President of the United States, and the Prime Minister of England, about the state of future trade between the two countries. And this particular meeting is scheduled to be held on a Saturday, when the major financial market centers are essentially closed for business. Depending on the result of such a meeting, there could be a major implication for the GBPUSD currency pair when the market opens, which could likely result in a major gap up or gap down price move.

Many times it’s extremely difficult to predict if and by what extent the market will react to such types of weekend events. And so from the perspective of trading, predicting forex market gaps does not provide for a viable trading strategy. Sure you can catch an upside or downside gap from time to time, however, there does not appear to be any real discernible edge in trading opening gaps in this particular manner.

Forex investors trade the weekend gap by expecting Week start opening price to return to Weekend closing price.

The origin of retail weekend trading is quite recent and is entirely due to the success of cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies trade non-stop 24/7 across all the various exchanges and many younger traders see this as a great advantage because they can continue to deploy their trading models over the weekend as well.

In fact, weekends are seen as a crucial time for cryptocurrency traders. An article from CNBC reported various milestones posted on weekends:

• Some of Bitcoin’s steepest price swings have happened over weekends.
• Approximately 60% of weekends since December 2017 have seen a 5% move or higher over a weekend.
• 82% of weekends have seen at least a 3% move by Bitcoin.

The popularity of weekend trading in cryptocurrencies provided by many CFD brokers. With global markets more and more interconnected, having efficient capital markets is essential and we might see more of a shift towards 24/7 trading in the coming years as “traditional asset classes” catch up to cryptocurrencies.

Weekends are the ideal time to learn the ins and outs of a trading platform and find out how your chosen platform can assist your trading. A selection of advanced trading platforms allows traders to analyze a number of different strategies, applied to past data, for a better understanding of how these strategies would have played out. This process is called back-testing and is an excellent way of testing a strategy before employing it in live conditions.

The process of back-testing involves the selection of an earlier date and time on the chart (to a period in which you are unfamiliar with price action), ‘locking the view’ and analyzing the detailed report afterwards to gauge how well the strategy would have done.

It must be mentioned that just because a strategy performed in a particular manner in the past, doesn’t mean that it will perform in that way in the future. The goal of back-testing is to simulate how a strategy would have played out and observe the variability of expected vs actual results of the strategy.

This is perfect to do when the market isn’t actually moving, allowing traders an environment to better manage the emotions of trading.