When does US30 (Dow) actually rise?

Every hour below is a real measurement: how often US30 (Dow) closed higher than it opened in that hour of the week, across 60,798 hourly bars. Not signals — base rates, with the sample size on every figure.

When does US30 (Dow) actually move?

We cannot demonstrate which way US30 (Dow) leans in any hour — that is the caveat above, and it is honest. How far it moves is a different question, and this one it answers.

A typical hour in US30 (Dow) ends up 17 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 (Monday 21:00) moves 6.2. The spread on a round trip is about 2.0, 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, US30 (Dow)'s biggest windows were still 2.64× a typical hour on data the selection had never seen, at 0.928 rank correlation across the week and 0.883 inside the busiest four hours, where the obvious "London is busy" shape has already been removed. 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 US30 (Dow), from 60,798 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 US30 (Dow) 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 the trading week, the hour that has leaned up hardest is 18:00 UTC — US30 (Dow) closed higher 53.8% of 2,833 times there, though that lean is thinner than it looks. The weakest is 22:00 UTC, closing higher only 48.5% of 1,570 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 US30 (Dow) 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

Friday has been the friendliest day (51.6% of 11,294), Tuesday the least (50.8%). By calendar month, November leads at 52.7% and December trails at 50.3% — 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%.

28 of the published rules run on US30 (Dow), and 7 of those were still net-positive on the held-back 30%. 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. 53.8% from 2,833 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 US30 (Dow) sits

Two things worth knowing before you treat any of the above as US30 (Dow)-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:

• GBP/JPY — -0.55 — a good deal of shape in common.
• EUR/JPY — -0.51 — a good deal of shape in common.
• NAS100 — +0.46 — 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 US30 (Dow) itself moves beyond chance:

• The 21:00–22:00 UTC rollover is thin liquidity to be avoided.
  US30 (Dow): 48.6% in the window against 51.5% outside it, on 2,284 candles — z = -2.7.

What we have tested that covers US30 (Dow)

Each of these is a claim this industry sells, measured against a control. ⚠ Only the ones whose measurement actually included US30 (Dow) are listed — several of our tests exclude markets outright, and offering one here that skipped this symbol would be the opposite of the point.

• Do weekend gaps fill?
  "Gaps fill 90% of the time" is true and empty — a matched midweek move fills just as often. The indices do the opposite.
• Does the first hour set the day?
  A green first hour tells you the first hour was green. Not one of 17 markets reaches even a weak significance bar.
• 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 US30 (Dow)'s strongest hour in the dashboard →