Festival weeks: fewer sessions, thinner books, smaller samples
Holiday-shortened weeks distort weekly averages. Tag them instead of training a theory on them.
A three-session week is not a small five-session week. Fewer sessions, different participation and often wider spreads — and if your weekly averages ignore that, they will drift in ways you cannot explain.
Normalise weekly statistics by session count
Weekly P&L is misleading when the number of trading days changes. Per-session figures survive the festival calendar; weekly totals do not.
Compare per-session numbers when session counts differ.
Use the exchange holiday list
Your bank holidays and the exchange calendar are not the same list. A closed market day should never appear in the journal as a missed session, and a session you skipped should not hide behind a holiday.
Small samples make bad theories
A profitable festival week is a handful of trades in unusual conditions. Tag it, review it like any other thin sample, and resist the urge to build a seasonal strategy out of it.
- Import the exchange holiday list, not a bank calendar
- Report per-session figures when session counts differ
- Tag shortened and special sessions separately
- Treat a profitable thin week as a small sample, not a season
Key takeaways
- Normalise weekly numbers by session count.
- Align the calendar to the exchange holiday list.
- Treat festival weeks as small, unusual samples.
Where these numbers come from
Not advice, not a call. NiyataBook is a personal trading journal, not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst. Everything above looks backwards at trades that already closed. What happened in a book does not promise what happens next, and F&O can take a year’s savings in a week.