We have Exness's Ramadan 2025 trading schedule notice and its published spread page open side by side. The schedule lists modified hours for metals and forex pairs from late February through late March — roughly two fewer hours per session, thirty consecutive trading days. The published EUR/USD spread on standard accounts: 1.0 pips. That figure appears on both pages identically. No Ramadan adjustment. No asterisk.
What the Numbers Actually Say
Start with the exchange side. The Dubai Financial Market and DGCX both compress trading sessions during Ramadan, aligning with UAE government directives on reduced working hours across institutions. The DFM continuous trading window shortens by roughly ninety minutes. DGCX gold futures — the 995-purity contracts benchmarking Gulf physical delivery — compress similarly, losing between ninety minutes and two hours from the afternoon segment. These are institutional adjustments with institutional consequences. They ripple outward.
The ripple reaches retail through broker schedule updates. Exness publishes modified trading hours for metals and major forex pairs during Ramadan. The contraction concentrates in the GST afternoon, which happens to overlap with London's highest-liquidity session. FXTM follows the same pattern through its own holiday schedule notices, compressing the same hours for the same duration.
Here is where the numbers get genuinely interesting. Exness lists a 1.0-pip average spread on EUR/USD for standard accounts. FXTM lists 1.5 pips on the equivalent tier. Both figures are twenty-four-hour weighted averages. They are not recalculated for Ramadan. They carry no footnote breaking the number down by session or calendar period. The figure on the comparison page in February is the figure in the middle of March when Ramadan sessions are fully compressed. Same display. Different reality underneath.
The denominator matters more than the number. A twenty-four-hour average flattens the distinction between three peak hours of London overlap — when spreads run tightest — and the twelve quiet Asian hours where they drift wide. During a standard month, a disciplined trader executing from India during the GST afternoon ignores the twenty-four-hour average entirely. They time entries to the overlap window and collect tighter fills than the published figure suggests. During Ramadan, that overlap window gets cut. The average holds steady. The execution reality does not.
The effect is particularly sharp on gold. XAU/USD spot trades around the clock, but the heaviest institutional volume flows through the London session around the LBMA PM fix. For an Indian trader executing gold through Exness or FXTM during GST hours, the Ramadan compression does not remove random overnight hours — it specifically shortens the afternoon segment containing the densest liquidity. The twenty-four-hour published spread on gold swallows this distinction whole.
We checked both Exness and FXTM published spread data for any Ramadan-period notation. Neither carries a seasonal adjustment, a session-specific breakout, or an asterisk. Think of it as two clocks running at different speeds. The published spread refreshes on a twenty-four-hour cycle. The actual execution window for Gulf-session traders refreshes on a seasonal cycle tied to the Hijri calendar. During Ramadan, the second clock loses two hours per day while the first keeps ticking unchanged. Every year. Silently.
What Nobody Mentions
The effective cost per available minute of quality execution shifts during Ramadan. It shifts every single year. Nobody publishes the adjusted number.
We traced this pattern across five consecutive Ramadans. The consistency is almost mechanical.
Ramadan 2021: April 13 through May 12. Gulf exchanges shortened sessions. Exness and FXTM published spreads — unchanged. Ramadan 2022: April 2 through May 1. Same compression, same published figures. Ramadan 2023: March 23 through April 20. Identical. Ramadan 2024: March 12 through April 9. No revision. Ramadan 2025: late February through late March — the schedule notice open in front of us right now. Five years. Five session compressions. Zero spread recalculations on either platform's comparison page.
This deserves a brief technical detour because the mechanism is quietly beautiful. Broker spread averages are sampled across the full twenty-four-hour cycle, weighted by tick volume. During Ramadan, the GST afternoon shortens. That afternoon normally contributes a disproportionate share of tight-spread ticks because it sits inside the London overlap, when institutional order flow peaks. Fewer ticks get recorded in that tight window. A larger fraction of the day's spread observations come from wider overnight prints and thin Asian-session levels. Mathematically, the average should creep wider during Ramadan, but the shift is small enough to vanish inside a figure rounded to one decimal place.
So 1.0 pips remains 1.0 pips on the page. The internal composition changed. More of that 1.0 originates from wider-spread hours. Less from the London window Gulf-session traders actually execute in. What looks like price stability is a measurement artifact. Five years running.
What strikes us about this pattern is not the compression itself — Ramadan session adjustments are expected and announced in advance — but the complete absence of corresponding spread data. Every other seasonal event affecting liquidity gets at least passing acknowledgment in broker analytics. Christmas week spreads widen and platforms note it. New Year's Day sessions are flagged. The Ramadan compression, which runs for thirty consecutive days rather than a long weekend, receives schedule notices but no pricing commentary. Thirty days of modified execution conditions treated identically to the other three hundred and thirty-five.
For Indian traders routing deposits through UPI to Exness or FXTM, this matters because their execution timing is not random across twenty-four hours. It is concentrated in the GST afternoon — when they are awake, when Gulf desks are active, when London is in session. That particular slice of the day compresses during Ramadan while the overnight cycle stays unchanged. The published average reflects the full cycle. Their experience reflects the compressed slice. If broker spread pages carried a "Ramadan session average" alongside the twenty-four-hour figure, the conversation would be different. Five years of data suggest that line is not coming.
The Real Cost
Time for the arithmetic that neither broker's Ramadan notice provides. Every input comes from published data.
Exness standard account, EUR/USD published spread: 1.0 pips. Per standard lot of 100,000 units, one pip equals $10. At USD/INR 83.50, that converts cleanly: $10 × 83.50 = ₹835 per round trip.
FXTM standard account, EUR/USD published spread: 1.5 pips. Same lot, same conversion: 1.5 × $10 × 83.50 = ₹1,252.50 per round trip.
The gap between the two: 0.5 pips × $10 × 83.50 = ₹417.50 per round trip. Keep that number visible.
Now build the Ramadan month. A typical Ramadan window contains twenty-two forex trading days. Assume a GST-session trader executes two round trips per day timed to the London overlap. Forty-four round trips across the month.
On Exness: 44 × ₹835 = ₹36,740 in spread cost. On FXTM: 44 × ₹1,252.50 = ₹55,110.
Those totals match what the same trader would pay in any other month at the same frequency. The published spread did not change. But the execution window did.
In a normal month, the GST afternoon overlap with London runs approximately four hours. Twenty-two trading days times four hours produces eighty-eight prime execution hours. Spread cost divided by prime hours: ₹36,740 ÷ 88 = ₹417.50 per prime hour on Exness.
During Ramadan, that overlap compresses to approximately two and a half hours. Twenty-two days times 2.5: fifty-five prime hours. Same total cost, fewer hours to deploy it. ₹36,740 ÷ 55 = ₹668 per prime hour.
Set those two figures side by side. ₹417.50 per prime hour in a normal month. ₹668 during Ramadan. A 60% jump in effective spread cost per available hour of London-overlap execution. Nothing on the spread page moved. Everything about the per-hour economics did.
On FXTM, the same arithmetic yields ₹1,002 per prime Ramadan hour against ₹626 normally. Same percentage increase. The wider starting spread makes every absolute figure larger.
For context, both brokers offer pro-tier accounts at 0.1 pips published spread. At that level: 0.1 × $10 × 83.50 = ₹83.50 per round trip. Over 44 Ramadan trades, ₹3,674 total. The per-prime-hour cost under compression: ₹3,674 ÷ 55 = ₹66.80, against ₹41.75 normally. The percentage jump — 60% — is identical regardless of account tier. The compression premium is structural. It does not care which spread tier you selected.
The broker gap also compounds under the shorter clock. That ₹417.50 per-trade difference between Exness and FXTM, multiplied across 44 Ramadan round trips, produces ₹18,370 in one month. In a normal month the absolute gap is identical — but during Ramadan, you have thirty-three fewer prime hours in which to recover it through patient entry timing. The spread differential becomes stickier when the execution window tightens around it.
If You Only Remember One Thing
₹668 per prime hour. That is the effective spread cost on an Exness standard account during compressed Ramadan sessions — one standard lot, two daily round trips, USD/INR at 83.50. In a normal month the identical calculation returns ₹417.50. The published spread page displays 1.0 pips in both periods. The cost per available hour of London-overlap execution tells a story the spread page was never designed to tell, and it requires a calendar rather than a comparison widget to read correctly.
₹18,370 across twenty-two trading days. That is the rupee gap between a 1.0-pip broker and a 1.5-pip broker during one Ramadan at standard lot size and moderate frequency. During the remaining eleven months, a wider published spread can be partially offset by timing entries into deeper liquidity windows. During Ramadan, those windows shrink by a third and the offset disappears. The number that should decide whether you switch brokers before the Hijri calendar compresses your execution clock is not the published spread. It is ₹18,370. The arithmetic does not require belief. It requires multiplication.