Best Session to Trade - At a glance!

16 Apr 2022

Market Sessions Introduction

Watching the market 24/7 is completely unnecessary, considering price only moves during certain periods of the day.
These periods are known as "Sessions" and relate to an exchange's location on the planet.

The two most popular sessions - London & New York - typically see the most volatility and gross number of trades placed.
However, there are strategies designed around specific sessions, such as the "Asian Breakout", which targets the first two hours of the Tokyo session.

The sessions occur every trading day (M - F) during the following UTC times:

• London: 0800-1600
  
• New York: 1300-2100
  
• Tokyo: 0000-0800
  
• Sydney: 2200-0600
  

The London and NY session overlap for 3 hours - this is known as the "Golden Window" in Forex trading...but why?

Advanced Forex Session Analysis
I created a tool to explore the concept of the "Golden Window" and answer a few burning questions:

• did every asset have the same golden window?
  
• if the golden window shifted, could you detect it?
  
• does restricting trading times to the golden window improve win rate?
  
• what does the golden window even look like?
  

This tool is available for free and open source - Advanced Forex Sessions

It scores each session by Volatility (ticks moved) and Volume (number of trades placed), then displays the windows on chart.

I've discovered answers to a few questions and can confidently say, NO, not every asset has the same golden window.
In fact, nearly all small-cap cryptocurrencies have a golden window during the Tokyo or Sydney sessions.

YES, we can detect the window shifting by scoring each session via a rolling average.

MAYBE, it's hard to say if restricting trading times will work for every strategy, but I have seen minor improvements for traditional strategies that buy/sell with fixed take profits and stop losses.

WHAT does the Golden Window look like?
Check out the Advanced Forex Sessions indicator and see for yourself...