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published-date Published: January 22, 2025
update-date Last Update: January 28, 2025

Set Holidays on Trading Sessions

This guide is case specific – all of the instructions are written for the 2024 US Thanksgiving holiday. 

All of the US sessions currently have the Thanksgiving holiday set to FULLY OPEN, which means that trading will be enabled on those sessions during Thanksgiving.

In order to set the proper trading times for holidays, it’s necessary to create the shorter holiday session within the regular trading sessions. Here’s how to do it:

  1. Log in to the TradeLocker Back Office
  2. Hover over Instruments and select Trade Sessions from the dropdown menu.
  3. On the left side in the Filter Panel, hit Search. All of your trading sessions will be displayed.
  4. Select the session which you want to edit. A pop-up window will appear. In this case, the Energies trading session will be edited.
  5. On the left side of the window, there are 3 dropdown menus. Under “Common parameters”, you can see the session name, time zone and country code. Use this dropdown to make sure that you are editing the right session.
    IMPORTANT: By default, countries other than the ones you set the Holiday on (in the Holidays tab) will not be affected. With that in mind, it’s important to set the appropriate holiday session for the affected countries and edit the sessions that have the necessary country code on them. In this case, it’s all the sessions that have United States as the country code.
  6. Select Template parameters. This is where you will start editing your session.
  7. Select Set holidays. Another pop-up window will appear, which displays all of the holidays added to the selected trade session.
  8. In the list, find the holiday for which you want to edit parameters such as fully closing the session, shortening the session etc. In this case, the US Thanksgiving session will be edited.
  9. When hovering over the trade session status, you will see if it’s currently set to Open, Close or Shortened day. Since Energies have an early close on 28/11/2024 and 29/11/2024, the Shortened day option will be selected.
  10. Once you select Shortened day, click Edit. A pop-up window will appear which contains the configuration for the session period for the selected date in the trade session (in this case, 28-11-2024 in the Energies trade session).
  11. As the session needs to cover the entire 24-hour day, you will need several Session periods. This depends on when the session is meant to open or close. In order to configure that, click on Session periods. A pop-up window will appear. In the case of Energies, we need 3 session periods.
  12. Select 3 different periods (for example – Continuous 1, Continuous 2 and another Continuous 1), or however many you need. The periods that you select don’t differ from one another, so pick whichever ones you want. Click Save. The pop-up window will close.
  13. You will now see that the session period has 3 sub-periods (or however many you selected). You will use those sub-periods to cover the entire US Thanksgiving day. Under Display name, you can change the name of the period. Under Trading status, you will need to select if the trading is open or closed during that sub-period.
  14. You will receive the trading session specification from your liquidity provider. If we, for example, look at US Oil and Natural Gas, we see that on US Thanksgiving on 28/11/2024 they have a shortened session which closes at 9:20 PM GMT+2.
  15. IMPORTANT: Make sure to convert the time zone provided to you in the session specification to the time zone specified in the trading session that you are editing.
    In our case, it’s necessary to convert GMT+2 to New York time zone. If the session closes at 9:20 PM GMT+2, this means that it closes at 2:20 PM (14:20) New York time. We would recommend using a converter such as worldtimebuddy.com to prevent any confusion.
  16. Let’s input the session times. The trading session will be open from 00:00 to 14:20. In the first session period and in the top box, input 00:00. This is the start time of the open session and the day.
  17. In the top box of the second session period, we will input the beginning time of the closed period, which is 14:20 in our case.
  18. In the third session period, you input the rest of the day. Here you need to account for the beginning of the next session, which you can see in the regular trade session setting during normal days. In the case of energies, it’s 18:05 when the session opens back up.
  19. If everything is set correctly, you will see something similar to the screenshot below.
    This means that the Energies session on 28/11/2024 will open at 00:00 New York time, close at 14:20 New York time and then resume regularly according to the regular trading session.
  20. Click Save & Close on all windows that opened during the setup, otherwise the changes will not apply.
  21. Once you are done with all the edits, go to the TradeLocker platform. Find an instrument for which you want to check the session times. Let’s check Natural Gas. Select NGAS from the list of instruments and click on the session time indicator at the top. If everything is set correctly, you will see the holiday and the holiday times displayed there.

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