(Bloomberg) -- Fridays used to be a slow day for Tony Trzcinka, a portfolio manager at Impax Asset Management, but now it’s the busiest time of the week.

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What used to be a day for thinking about long-term trends has turned into a critical time to prepare portfolios for the kind of market moving news that President Donald Trump has made a habit of delivering over the weekend. Demand for Friday portfolio tweaks has been enough to make trading high-grade corporate bonds on Friday 31% more expensive than it is the rest of the week, according to analysis from Barclays Plc.

“We’ve definitely noticed more activity in the market on Fridays,” said Impax’s Trzcinka, who oversees around $3 billion in assets. “You don’t know what’s coming on the weekend.”

The situation is a reversal of the trend in recent years, when Friday was the cheapest day of the week to buy and sell bonds. In March and April, the last trading day of the week accounted for 18% of weekly investment-grade corporate bond volume, up from 16% in 2023 and 2024, Barclays analysts Zornitsa Todorova and Andrea Diaz Lafuente wrote in a report. Their analysis focused on the total notional value of investment grade bonds changing hands each day.

The increased tempo on Friday is part of a broader jump in activity across the markets since Trump re-entered the White House and disrupted the economic outlook with his often unexpected policy decisions on tariffs, immigration and foreign affairs. The average number of shares traded in the equity markets each week is up 37% in 2025 from what it was in the four previous years, while equity trading on Friday has jumped 42%, according to analysis done by Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Athanasios Psarofagis.

The reasons for this jump were on display last weekend. On Friday, Trump said that he might be willing to lower the tariff rate on China to 80%. Then, early Monday morning, the situation changed dramatically when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a pause on many tariffs aimed at China and a reset in the trade negotiations between the two countries. The S&P 500 jumped 3.3%, the Nasdaq 100 Index pushed back into a bull market, and credit markets signaled a steep drop in investor fears about defaults.

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Mark Clegg, a senior fixed income trader at Allspring Global Investments in Milwaukee, said that Bessent’s moves were only the latest lesson in the importance of de-risking portfolios before the weekend.

“No one want to be a tad too long or short versus their target and come in on a Monday morning to try to correct things after a massive market shift,” said Clegg.

Clegg said he uses Fridays to “shed any excess risk.” For Trzcinka, the preparations have involved selling credit and buying Treasuries, or migrating to higher-quality bonds to manage risk.

In the corporate bond markets, the weekly trading patterns have also been changed by the rise of electronic trading and portfolio trading, which have made it easier to quickly buy or sell a whole basket of bonds.

“Everything has become a bit faster,” Todorova at Barclays said. “Because things are faster, investors can afford to do this on a Friday because they have certainty that they would be able to execute.”

The increased speed and volume, however, hasn’t made the trading cheaper, especially for the asset managers who, in recent weeks, have been in a rush as the weekend approaches.

“Portfolio managers are forced to sell what they can, not what they want,” said David Schiffman, a portfolio manager at Cantor Fitzgerald Asset Management, adding that he is often on the lookout for relative bargains on Friday.

“The lack of direction and certainty on an almost daily basis is close to the most extreme levels I have seen in my career,” said Schiffman.

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