Holding trades through 5 PM EST rollover (need advice on spread spikes)

Hey everyone, I’m hoping to get some advice from the more experienced intraday and short-term swing traders here.

A bit of background: I’ve been trading live for about a year and a half now. After a lot of trial and error, I finally started finding some consistency trading the London/NY overlap, mostly focusing on EURUSD and GBPUSD. My strategy usually involves catching the momentum during the US session, but recently, I’ve been running into a frustrating issue with trade management when setups carry over into the late afternoon.

My biggest headache right now is the notorious 5 PM EST rollover (NY close / Asian open).

Last week I had a classic scenario: I was in a solid EURUSD short, up about 25 pips, and the market structure looked great for a continuation into the Asian session. Instead of closing, I decided to hold. Right at 5 PM, the liquidity dropped, the spread widened massively, and my trailing stop loss got triggered. Literally ten minutes later, the spread normalized and the price dropped another 20 pips in my original direction.

Right now, I split my trading between a standard MT4 setup and a secondary account on brondesburyglobal, and I notice this massive spread jump happens pretty much everywhere for that 15 - 30 minute window. It’s obviously a broader market liquidity issue and not platform-specific, but it’s really messing with my risk-to-reward ratio.

I'm trying to figure out the best mechanical rule to deal with this so I stop making emotional decisions at the end of the day. For those of you who trade similar strategies:

- Do you have a strict, non-negotiable rule to close all intraday positions by 4:30 PM EST, even if the chart looks like it wants to keep running?

- If you do hold through the rollover gap, do you manually widen your stop loss to survive the spike, and then move it back? (Doesn't that completely mess up your risk management if actual volatility hits?)

- Or do you just accept the occasional unfair stop-out as the cost of doing business?

Would love to hear how you guys structure your trading plans around this dead zone. Thanks in advance!

I’d probably have a rule to close before rollover unless the trade was planned as a swing from the start. Widening the stop just to survive the spread can easily mess up your risk management. Those extra pips are tempting, but sometimes better to protect the trade and avoid that low liquidity window.