When does USD/JPY actually rise?

Every hour below is a real measurement: how often USD/JPY closed higher than it opened in that hour of the week, across 110,218 hourly bars. Not signals — base rates, with the sample size on every figure.

When does USD/JPY actually move?

USD/JPY 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 USD/JPY ends up 5.5 pips 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 2.9. The spread on a round trip is about 1.0, 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, USD/JPY's biggest windows were still 1.7× a typical hour on data the selection had never seen, at 0.929 rank correlation across the week and 0.877 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 USD/JPY, from 110,218 hourly bars:

The gap is 0.0 percentage points — inside what chance produces at these sample sizes. On direction alone, the overlap is not a better bet for USD/JPY 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 22:00 UTC — USD/JPY closed higher 55.3% of 4,592 times there, far enough from a coin flip to be beyond chance. The weakest is 01:00 UTC, closing higher only 46.4% of 4,596 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:

• Sunday 21:00 UTC — closed higher 67.3% of 640 times (z=8.4) · rollover hour, see note above
• Sunday 22:00 UTC — closed higher 64.4% of 918 times (z=8.3) · rollover hour, see note above
• Friday 20:00 UTC — closed lower 59.1% of 924 times (z=-6.0)

Days and seasons

Monday has been the friendliest day (50.9% of 22,030), Friday the least (49.5%). By calendar month, June leads at 51.7% and December trails at 48.9% — 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%.

12 of the published rules run on USD/JPY, and 1 of those was 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. 55.3% from 4,592 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. 15 years of "usually" contains every kind of "except when".

The guide walks through all four traps with live numbers.

Where USD/JPY sits

Two things worth knowing before you treat any of the above as USD/JPY-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 — +0.75 — almost the same schedule. Holding both is close to one position at twice the size, not two edges.
• USD/CHF — +0.65 — a good deal of shape in common.
• USD/CAD — +0.64 — 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 USD/JPY itself moves beyond chance:

• The Sunday open gaps and spreads are wide - wait for Tokyo.
  USD/JPY: 61.9% in the window against 50.9% outside it, on 2,480 candles — z = 10.4.
• Wednesday carries triple swap, so its rollover is the one to avoid.
  USD/JPY: 46.3% in the window against 52.3% outside it, on 1,833 candles — z = -4.4.
• ICT Asian kill zone (20:00-22:00 NY) ranges rather than trends.
  USD/JPY: 48.2% in the window against 50.7% outside it, on 9,192 candles — z = -4.4.

What we have tested that covers USD/JPY

Each of these is a claim this industry sells, measured against a control. ⚠ Only the ones whose measurement actually included USD/JPY 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 the opening range set the day?
  The range breaks on 99.8–100.0% of days. A signal that fires every session has not selected anything.
• Does the trading day of the month matter?
  The chart this whole category is built on. 285 slots tested, 0 clear the bar, and the strongest anywhere reaches z = 2.99.
• Why does every currency pair fall at the New York close?
  The biggest number this archive contains, and it is worth about one tick: 12 of 12 markets fall, and 11 of them by less than the spread.
• 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.

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 USD/JPY's strongest hour in the dashboard →