Measured, not guessed · 2011..2026 of H1 data

When does UK100 (FTSE) actually rise?

Every hour below is a real measurement: how often UK100 (FTSE) closed higher than it opened in that hour of the week, across 20,334 hourly bars. Not signals — base rates, with the sample size on every figure.

The strongest and weakest hours

Averaged across the trading week, the hour that has leaned up hardest is 16:00 UTC — UK100 (FTSE) closed higher 53.9% of 921 times there, though that lean is thinner than it looks. The weakest is 20:00 UTC, closing higher only 44.0% of 772 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.

No single weekday-hour bucket of UK100 (FTSE) clears the |z|≥3 bar. That is a finding, not a failure — most markets, most of the time, are indistinguishable from chance at this resolution.

Days and seasons

Weekday	Up-rate	Sample
Monday	51.3%	n=4,081
Tuesday	50.2%	n=4,182
Wednesday	51.5%	n=4,112
Thursday	50.8%	n=4,204
Friday	50.8%	n=3,755

Wednesday has been the friendliest day (51.5% of 4,112), Tuesday the least (50.2%). By calendar month, January leads at 52.4% and July trails at 49.7% — 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 on data it was never fitted to. We ran that test across 5,086 rules on the whole board: 307 finished net positive, and only 214 survived the held-out final third of the history.

None of the survivors run on UK100 (FTSE) 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. 53.9% from 921 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. 3 years of "usually" contains every kind of "except when".

The guide walks through all four traps with live numbers.