Holiday opens and the false sense of a free gap
After public holidays the overnight void looks generous. Liquidity and news windows often make it a different animal.
Australian public holidays compress overseas news into a single reopen. The gap on the chart looks like any other void; the order book behind it often does not.
In cohort discussions we treat post-holiday opens as a separate drill: wider spreads, thinner depth in mid-caps, and a higher chance that the first half-hour is noise around a delayed institutional print. Exhaustion and breakaway labels still apply, but fill timing statistics from ordinary Tuesdays transfer poorly.
If your journal shows repeated losses on the first session after a long weekend, the fix is rarely a new indicator. It is a calendar note: reduce size, widen the definition of “wait,” or skip the open entirely until the second hour.
We avoid scheduling Intensives on those weeks when we can — not because teaching stops, but because the examples themselves need ordinary session texture.