When does BTC/USD actually rise?

Every hour below is a real measurement: how often BTC/USD closed higher than it opened in that hour of the week, across 68,763 hourly bars. Not signals — base rates, with the sample size on every figure.

When does BTC/USD actually move?

BTC/USD leans in some hours and not others, which the rest of this page is about. It also moves far more in some hours than others, and that is the sturdier of the two facts.

A typical hour in BTC/USD ends up 61 pts from where it opened — and covers rather more than that on the way, since a move out and part-way back still finishes near its start. Every figure in this section is that net distance; its quietest (Sunday 07:00) moves 40. The spread on a round trip is about 20.0, so the gap between the busiest hour and the quietest one is the difference between a move worth paying for and one that is mostly cost.

Picked on pre-2020 candles alone, BTC/USD's biggest windows were still 1.18× a typical hour on data the selection had never seen, at 0.43 rank correlation across the week — but only -0.373 inside the busiest four hours, which is weak enough that the ordering here should be read as description of the past rather than a timetable. How that was tested →

Does the London–New York overlap actually deliver?

Ask when to trade anything and you get the same answer everywhere: the London–New York overlap, 12:00–16:00 UTC. Those pages do cite numbers — the overlap is roughly 19% of the day and carries over a third of daily volume, and spreads there are genuinely the tightest. Every one of those is a figure about how busy the hour is. None is a figure about which way it goes. So here is that number for BTC/USD, from 68,763 hourly bars:

The gap is 0.2 percentage points — inside what chance produces at these sample sizes. On direction alone, the overlap is not a better bet for BTC/USD than the rest of the day. That does not make the advice useless: the overlap is where liquidity and spreads are best, which matters for cost. It just is not an edge in which way price closes.

Sessions overlap by design, so these windows share bars.

The strongest and weakest hours

Averaged across all seven days, the hour that has leaned up hardest is 22:00 UTC — BTC/USD closed higher 54.4% of 2,819 times there, far enough from a coin flip to be beyond chance. The weakest is 02:00 UTC, closing higher only 48.2% of 2,817 times.

Hour × weekday, the whole picture

Colour is the up-rate — red leaned down, teal leaned up. The brass dot marks buckets whose lean is statistically beyond chance at |z|≥3. Most cells have no dot. That is the honest shape of the market: mostly noise, with a few stubborn corners.

The three most stubborn corners of the grid:

• Thursday 03:00 UTC — closed lower 57.3% of 436 times (z=-3.4)
• Saturday 21:00 UTC — closed higher 59.8% of 358 times (z=3.4) · rollover hour, see note above
• Wednesday 21:00 UTC — closed higher 58.2% of 435 times (z=3.0) · rollover hour, see note above

Days and seasons

Wednesday has been the friendliest day (51.6% of 10,420), Thursday the least (50.2%). By calendar month, July leads at 51.4% and June trails at 50.1% — month buckets carry roughly a twelfth of the sample each, so hold them more loosely than the hourly figures.

Did any of it survive a real backtest?

Colours are description. A different question is whether a simple rule built on them — enter at the open of a bucket, exit at its close, pay a realistic spread — would have made money, and kept making it after a realistic spread is charged. We ran that test across 4,248 rules on the whole board: 200 finished net positive — 4.7%.

No published rule runs on BTC/USD once spread costs are charged. The strategy board shows that too — a leaderboard that only shows winners is lying by omission.

Watch it live

These are the same numbers, updating as each hour begins — free to embed on your own site from the widget builder:

Read it without fooling yourself

• The percentage is the headline, not the story. 54.4% from 2,819 samples is information; the same figure from 40 samples is noise. Every number here carries its n.
• The dots matter more than the colours. A vivid cell with no dot is well inside what chance produces.
• Direction is free; getting paid is not. A reliable lean smaller than your spread costs more than it earns.
• These are frequencies, not forecasts. 8 years of "usually" contains every kind of "except when".

The guide walks through all four traps with live numbers.

Where BTC/USD sits

Two things worth knowing before you treat any of the above as BTC/USD-specific.

These markets keep almost the same clock

Correlating the shape of the trading day — each hour's distance from that market's own average hour — against every other market we hold:

• ETH/USD — +0.87 — almost the same schedule. Holding both is close to one position at twice the size, not two edges.
• GBP/JPY — +0.49 — a good deal of shape in common.
• USD/JPY — +0.48 — a good deal of shape in common.

Tested claims that land differently here

Of the 21 pieces of timing folklore we tested across all markets, these are the ones where BTC/USD itself moves beyond chance:

• The 21:00–22:00 UTC rollover is thin liquidity to be avoided.
  BTC/USD: 53.9% in the window against 50.7% outside it, on 4,093 candles — z = 3.9.
• The Asian session is not worth trading — low liquidity, no movement.
  BTC/USD: 49.9% in the window against 51.5% outside it, on 17,368 candles — z = -3.3.
• ICT Asian kill zone (20:00-22:00 NY) ranges rather than trends.
  BTC/USD: 49.4% in the window against 51.1% outside it, on 4,344 candles — z = -2.1.

What we have tested that covers BTC/USD

Each of these is a claim this industry sells, measured against a control. ⚠ Only the ones whose measurement actually included BTC/USD are listed — several of our tests exclude markets outright, and offering one here that skipped this symbol would be the opposite of the point.

• Does Bitcoin move on the weekend?
  The weekend is an ordinary trading period whose timetable is a different timetable — the biggest hour moves from 14:00 to 00:00 UTC.
• Should you only trade when the market is busy?
  The most repeated filter in this business, and it points the wrong way: 14 of 14 markets are LESS reliable after a big hour.
• Does a hot streak mean anything?
  A streak is as predictive at four weeks' lag as at one. Memory decays; drift does not — which is why there is no streak feature on this site.
• Does yesterday's high or low matter?
  68,762 breaks across 19 markets. The level holds 50.4% of the time — slightly less than an arbitrary level the same distance away.

All three blocks are computed from the same files this page is, so they cannot drift from it. The full picture — every market against every hour, with the noise count attached — is on the screener, and the tests behind the significance bar are on /evidence.

Open BTC/USD's strongest hour in the dashboard →