It's often not advisable to trade heavily on Mondays due to lower liquidity, increased volatility from weekend news, and the "Monday Effect," where markets react to overnight information, potentially causing slow price action early on before major institutions fully engage, making it harder to get good fills and leading to unpredictable swings, especially in currency markets where early Asian/European sessions are thin.
Mondays offer a special opportunity for day traders to make money. One reason is simply because Mondays historically favor the upside. There are no hard and fast rules for trading, but when the market opens on a Monday with prices below the calculated trading zone and below the previous day's close, it's a like.
Monday is usually a good day to buy because the market historically tends to drop at the beginning of the week, particularly around the middle of the month.
Frank Cross first reported it in a 1973 article published in the Financial Analysts Journal. The Monday effect has been attributed to the impact of short selling, companies' tendency to release more negative news on Friday nights, and the decline in market optimism a number of traders experience over the weekend.
However, some traders and investors believe that markets tend to trend downward on Mondays. This can mean much lower returns on Monday than there were to be had on Friday, making Monday traditionally known as a good day of the week to snaffle up potentially undervalued stocks and indices.
The "90 Rule" in trading, often called the 90-90-90 Rule, is a harsh market observation stating that roughly 90% of new traders lose 90% of their money within their first 90 days, highlighting the high failure rate due to lack of strategy, poor risk management, and emotional trading rather than market complexity. It serves as a cautionary tale, emphasizing that success requires discipline, a solid trading plan, proper education, and managing psychological pitfalls like overconfidence or revenge trading, not just market knowledge.
The 3-5-7 rule in day trading is a risk management guideline: risk no more than 3% of capital on any single trade, keep total open exposure under 5%, and aim for profit targets that are at least 7% of your risk (or a 7:1 reward-to-risk), encouraging disciplined position sizing and diversification to protect capital and improve long-term consistency.
Wednesday and Thursday, however, are more likely to see stock prices rise. In a bear market, some say the market is at its most volatile on Monday and Tuesday, when stocks tend to fall the most.
The 10-5-3 rule is a simple guideline for long-term investment returns, suggesting average annual gains of 10% for equities (stocks), 5% for debt (bonds), and 3% for cash/savings, helping investors set realistic expectations for asset allocation and risk/reward balance, though actual returns vary and depend heavily on market conditions and individual goals.
A 2019 study by Harvard Business Review found either Vanguard, BlackRock or State Street is the largest listed owner of 88% of S&P 500 companies. There is a perception that a few select companies own a vast majority of the stock market.
Saturdays and Sundays tend to be the least favourable days for trading forex. Most traders tend to avoid trading forex during holidays and around major news events.
Mondays usually have the lowest trading volume of the week. Markets are opening after the weekend, and traders take time to digest weekend news and set their plans for the week. Liquidity is often thin in the early hours, especially during the Asian session.
The Monday effect is a well-known market anomaly, denoting the significant decline in stock prices immediately after weekends compared with those after other weekdays (French, 1980).
How did one trader make $2.4 million in 28 minutes?
For one trader, the news event allowed for incredible profits in a very short amount of time. At 3:32:38 p.m. ET, a Dow Jones headline crossed the newswire reporting that Intel was in talks to buy Altera. Within the same second, a trader jumped into the options market and aggressively bought calls.
Some of the most frequent reasons for traders' failure to reach profitability are emotional decisions, poor risk management strategies, and lack of education.
