Which Weekday Each Market Moves Most, Measured

All five weekdays, every instrument

The average daily range on each weekday, measured over the window printed below. The widest day for each instrument is in bold, and the last column is how much wider that day is than the quietest one.

Window: 2026-02-28 to 2026-09-24 · Recalculated: 2026-09-27 06:12 UTC · measured on the OANDA feed our charting desk runs on

Average daily range on each weekday, widest in bold. The last column is how much wider the widest day is than the quietest one. Each weekday has roughly the same number of observations, printed on the ADR page.

What survives the measurement, and what does not

• Midweek really is widest. Nine of the ten major pairs post their widest average day on a Wednesday or a Thursday. Most central bank decisions, most of the important releases and the fullest desks land in the middle of the week, and it shows.
• The quiet day is Tuesday, not Monday. This is the one that comes out backwards. Monday is the narrowest day for none of the ten majors. Tuesday is the narrowest for seven of them. The folklore about Monday is so widely repeated that almost nobody checks it, and on this window it simply is not there.
• Friday is not the collapse it is described as. It fades late in the session, but the release calendar front loads it. It is the quietest day for three of the ten, all of them commodity dollar pairs, and ahead of Monday for most of the rest.

The one number to take away is the gap, and it is bigger than we expected. For the calmest instruments the widest weekday is only about 15 percent above the quietest, which is noise. But the yen pairs are extreme: USD/JPY's widest weekday averages over 80 percent more range than its quietest. Where the gap column is small, ignore the weekday. Where it is that large, it is worth knowing which day you are sitting down to trade.

Practise this in Chart Bound, free

The weekday barely matters. Reading the chart in front of you does. Chart Bound drills that part, free.

Play free, no signup →

Where the weekday does change your decisions

• Expectations, not entries. If you trade a Monday knowing it usually travels less, you stop forcing a target that needs a Wednesday to arrive.
• Position sizing at the extremes. Where the gap column is large, the same stop distance is a genuinely different amount of risk on the widest day than on the quietest.
• When you review. Comparing this month's Mondays with last month's Mondays removes one source of noise from your own journal.
• Nothing about holding over the weekend. That is a gap risk question and this table says nothing about it.

Method, and whose prices these are

The feed is OANDA's, read through the same charting desk we trade and teach on. We publish measurements taken on a named retail feed, with the window and the method stated, rather than a number copied from an older article.

Each figure is the mean of (high minus low) on completed daily bars that belong to that weekday, over the window above the table. The daily bar opens at the New York close, so the Sunday evening hours that belong to Monday's session are counted as Monday. The forming bar is excluded. Currency pairs are in pips, stock indexes in points, metals and oil in dollars. Each weekday carries roughly the same number of observations over a six month window, which is a few dozen days each: enough to see a pattern, not enough to settle a small difference.

These figures describe the past and the differences are small. Nothing here is financial advice.