Muhurat is not a Tuesday with extra lamps
A short ceremonial session distorts every time-of-day average unless you label it.
Muhurat trading is a short, symbolic session held around Diwali. Volumes, spreads and participation are unlike an ordinary day, and a lot of people trade it for reasons that have nothing to do with a tested process.
Why it breaks averages
A one-hour session dropped into a dataset of six-and-a-quarter-hour sessions will distort per-session averages, hourly buckets and any "last thirty minutes" statistic you keep.
Regular session
- 9:15 to 15:30
- Normal liquidity
- Full set of time buckets
- Comparable to the rest of the year
Muhurat session
- Roughly an hour, evening slot
- Thin books, wider spreads
- Ceremonial participation
- Tag it and exclude from hourly stats
Ceremonial is a legitimate tag
If the trade was symbolic, write that. Retrofitting a setup name onto a single festive fill is how a strategy ends up with a 100% win rate and one observation.
Trust the circular for timings
Special session dates and windows are announced by the exchanges. Your memory of last year is not a schedule.
- Tag the session type explicitly, not just the date
- Exclude it from hourly and per-session averages
- Label symbolic trades as ceremonial rather than as a setup
- Take timings from the exchange announcement for that year
Key takeaways
- Tag Muhurat and other special sessions separately.
- Do not force a strategy label onto ceremonial trades.
- Take session timings from exchange announcements.
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.