The Hour Each Market Actually Moves In, Measured

The answer, one row per market

A market that averages 60 pips a day does not hand them out evenly across 24 hours. The table below is the hour each instrument moves most, the hour it moves least, and the ratio between the two. That last column is the one worth reading: it says how much of the day is actually worth sitting at the desk for.

Window: 2026-02-28 to 2026-09-24 · Recalculated: 2026-09-27 06:12 UTC · measured on the OANDA feed our charting desk runs on

Weekends excluded. Currency pairs in pips, indices in points, metals and oil in dollars. The last column is how many times more the busiest hour moves than the quietest one.

What the pattern actually is

Three things show up in the measurement rather than in folklore.

• The overlap is real, and it holds for every single major. All ten of the major dollar and cross pairs we measure post their busiest hour between 12:00 and 16:00 UTC, where London's afternoon meets New York's morning. Not most of them: all of them. That is when the largest number of participants are at their desks at once.
• The stock indexes are on their own clocks, not New York's. Each one peaks in the first hour of its own cash session. The US indexes do their heaviest hour at 13:00 and 14:00 UTC, but the German and UK indexes peak at 07:00 and the Japanese one at 00:00. A guide that tells you to trade an index during the currency overlap is describing the wrong market.
• There are two quiet stretches, not one. The quietest hour is either around 04:00 UTC, after Tokyo and before London, or in the 20:00 to 23:00 window after New York has gone home. The spread you pay is the same in those hours as in the busy ones, which is the whole argument for choosing when you trade.

Practise this in Chart Bound, free

Knowing the hour is the easy half. Chart Bound drills reading what happens inside it, free.

Play free, no signup →

Every hour, every instrument

The reference grid. Rows are hours in UTC, columns are instruments, and each cell is the average range of that hour over the window. The busiest hour in each column is in bold.

Average range of each hour, weekends excluded, busiest hour of each column in bold. Scroll sideways for the rest of the instruments.

How to use it without fooling yourself

• Match your timeframe to the hour. A five minute strategy that needs movement to work will starve in a 2 pip hour, and no amount of patience fixes that.
• Size differently, not just later. A stop that is correct at 03:00 UTC is often far too tight at 13:00, because the same distance is a much smaller fraction of what that hour normally travels.
• Remember these are averages. A quiet hour still contains the occasional violent one, usually because something was released in it. The calendar decides that, not the clock.
• Convert to your own time zone once, and write it down. These are UTC, and the gap to your local time shifts twice a year when daylight saving moves.

Method, and whose prices these are

The feed is OANDA's, read through the same charting desk we trade and teach on. We are not a data vendor: we publish measurements taken on a named, ordinary retail feed, with the window and the method stated so anybody can check them.

Each figure is the mean of (high minus low) on completed hourly bars falling in that hour of the day, over the window printed above the table. Weekend hours are excluded. The forming bar is never counted. Currency pairs are in pips, stock indexes in points, metals and oil in dollars. Nothing is smoothed or gap filled, and an instrument without enough settled bars is left out rather than estimated.

Hour of day is a weak effect compared with what the economic calendar does to a single hour, and it describes the past. Nothing here is financial advice.