Measured, not guessed · 2003..2026 of H1 data

When does NZD/USD actually rise?

Every hour below is a real measurement: how often NZD/USD closed higher than it opened in that hour of the week, across 123,807 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 06:00 UTC — NZD/USD closed higher 53.7% of 5,159 times there, far enough from a coin flip to be beyond chance. The weakest is 20:00 UTC, closing higher only 40.1% of 5,152 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:

• Friday 20:00 UTC — closed lower 63.4% of 1,033 times (z=-8.6)
• Monday 20:00 UTC — closed lower 60.7% of 1,033 times (z=-6.9)
• Thursday 20:00 UTC — closed lower 59.4% of 1,029 times (z=-6.0)

Days and seasons

Weekday	Up-rate	Sample
Monday	50.1%	n=24,807
Tuesday	49.7%	n=24,734
Wednesday	49.8%	n=24,673
Thursday	49.9%	n=24,709
Friday	49.9%	n=22,055
Sunday	54.9%	n=2,829

Monday has been the friendliest day (50.1% of 24,807), Tuesday the least (49.7%). By calendar month, February leads at 50.5% and May trails at 49.1% — 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 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.

1 of those survivors runs on NZD/USD. The strategy board lists every one — including the losers, because 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. 53.7% from 5,159 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. 17 years of "usually" contains every kind of "except when".

The guide walks through all four traps with live numbers.