Reference 13 October 2026 · 5 min

A plain-English guide to bond market holidays: what changes when stocks trade and Treasuries don't.

Written Tuesday October 13, using Columbus Day as the live example: stocks and currencies traded, the cash Treasury market was shut, and DXY rose 0.37 only to give it all back when bonds reopened. Why the stock and bond calendars differ (exchanges versus SIFMA's recommendation), what still trades, what gets moved (Fed releases, bill auctions, EIA's petroleum report), how placeholder bars and missing FRED days distort charts, and why a currency move made while bonds are closed deserves suspicion until rates confirm it.

By Igor Komolov

Written Tuesday October 13, using Columbus Day as the live example. On Monday October 12, the S&P 500 traded a full session, Brent rose 1.8 percent and DXY climbed 0.37, but the cash Treasury market was shut. On Tuesday, when bonds reopened, the dollar gave the whole move back (today's analysis note has the numbers). Days when one market is open and another is closed are easy to misread. This guide covers what a bond market holiday is, what still happens on one, what gets moved to the next day, and how to read the charts and data around it.

Two calendars, not one

US stock exchanges set their own holiday schedules. The US bond market has no single exchange; it trades between dealers and clients. Its calendar comes from a recommendation by SIFMA, the industry association for securities firms and banks. SIFMA's recommendation is not a law and firms are not obliged to follow it, but in practice the cash Treasury market follows it.

Most of the time the two calendars agree. The main exceptions are Columbus Day (the second Monday in October) and Veterans Day (November 11): both are federal holidays on which SIFMA recommends a full bond market close while the stock exchanges stay open (as summarised by TradingHours' SIFMA schedule). SIFMA also recommends early closes, typically 2:00 PM ET, ahead of some holidays. Check the current year's schedule; do not assume.

What still happens on the day

Stocks trade normally, so equity indices print a full session.
Currencies trade. FX is a global, round-the-clock market, and London, Tokyo and other centres are open. DXY, which is calculated from currency rates, keeps printing.
Futures trade on their exchanges' own holiday hours, which can differ from the cash market. Oil futures settled normally on Columbus Day 2026 (Brent at $106.65, per Reuters).
Federal agencies are closed, so there are usually no US government data releases that day.

What gets moved

A Monday federal holiday pushes a lot of scheduled activity later in the week. For Columbus Day 2026, from primary sources:

Federal Reserve statistical releases. The Fed's calendar notes that the daily and weekly releases scheduled for Monday October 12 would be released on Tuesday October 13 (Federal Reserve calendar).
Treasury bill auctions. The 13- and 26-week bills, normally sold on Monday, were auctioned on Tuesday October 13 (Treasury Fiscal Data).
EIA's weekly petroleum report. Normally Wednesday at 10:30 AM ET; moved to Thursday October 15 at 12:00 PM ET. EIA publishes the full list of holiday shifts for the year: Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day and Veterans Day all move it in 2026 (EIA WPSR schedule). The natural gas storage report stays on Thursday at 10:30 AM ET.
Settlement. Trades that would have settled on the holiday settle on the next business day. This matters mostly to operations teams, but it is why a holiday can shift funding and repo activity into the following session.

A Monday holiday can also move releases in the other direction. When July 4 falls on a Saturday, the federal observance moves to Friday and the jobs report moves forward to Thursday. Our portfolio has documented misses from assuming the usual weekday; the only safe habit is to check each release's own calendar for the specific week.

How to read the data around a holiday

Missing days are not zero-change days. FRED's daily Treasury series (DGS10 and the rest) simply have no observation for the holiday. A chart that draws a flat line across the gap is drawing an absence of data, not a quiet market.
Some data vendors fill the gap. Yahoo Finance's ^TNX and ^TYX showed a single print for Columbus Day, with open, high, low and close all equal to the prior close. Any "daily change" computed from that bar will be exactly zero and is meaningless. Compare the next session's close with the last real session's close instead: on October 13, that is Tuesday's 5.217 percent against Friday's 5.244 percent, not against Monday's placeholder.
The first session back carries two days of news. Tuesday's bond move had to absorb Monday's oil rally, Monday's dollar strength and Tuesday's own news together. Treat it as a two-day change, and say so when you report it.
Holiday weeks compress the calendar. Releases that slide into later days stack up. In the week of October 12, 2026, Thursday October 15 carries PPI, retail sales, natural gas storage and the delayed petroleum report. Compressed days make it harder to say which release moved what; the event-window method helps.

Why currency moves on a bond holiday deserve suspicion

Interest-rate differentials are one of the main things that drive the dollar (see our guide to yield differentials). On a bond holiday, one side of that comparison is not updating. Some participants are also away, so liquidity is thinner and a given order can move the price more. A dollar move on such a day is real, in the sense that trades happened at those prices, but it has not been checked against the rates market.

Columbus Day 2026 is one example: DXY rose from 102.21 on Friday to 102.58 on Monday, then fell to about 102.20 at 4:00 PM ET on Tuesday as cash Treasuries reopened and yields fell (Yahoo Finance). One example is not evidence of a rule. The testable version is:

If a DXY move of 0.3 or more on a bond market holiday is not matched by cash yields moving the same way when the bond market reopens, then expect most of the currency move to be retraced in that first full session. Wrong if, across holidays, unconfirmed holiday moves hold as often as confirmed ones. We will record the next instance (Veterans Day, Wednesday November 11) against this statement.

A short checklist

Look up both calendars: the exchange's and SIFMA's.
List every release scheduled for the holiday week and check each one's own calendar for shifts.
Drop placeholder bars before computing changes; measure from the last real session.
Report the first session back as a multi-day change.
Treat currency moves made while bonds were closed as provisional until rates confirm them.