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

When does Silver (XAG/USD) actually rise?

Every hour below is a real measurement: how often Silver (XAG/USD) closed higher than it opened in that hour of the week, across 120,908 hourly bars. Not signals — base rates, with the sample size on every figure.

49.5%closed higher overall

120,908hourly bars measured

16yof history

37hour-buckets beyond chance (|z|≥3)

1.9×its busiest hour against a typical one

When does Silver (XAG/USD) actually move?

Silver (XAG/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.

Window (UTC)	Typical move	vs its own average hour	Round trip
Tuesday 13:00	7.6 pips	1.9×	3.0 pips
Friday 13:00	7.6 pips	1.9×	3.0 pips
Thursday 13:00	7.5 pips	1.9×	3.0 pips
Friday 14:00	7.2 pips	1.8×	3.0 pips
Tuesday 14:00	7.1 pips	1.8×	3.0 pips

A typical hour in Silver (XAG/USD) ends up 4.0 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 04:00) moves 2.5. The spread on a round trip is about 3.0, 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, Silver (XAG/USD)'s biggest windows were still 2.06× a typical hour on data the selection had never seen, at 0.818 rank correlation across the week and 0.923 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 Silver (XAG/USD), from 120,908 hourly bars:

Window	Closed higher	Sample	Avg move
London–NY overlap (12:00–16:00 UTC)	52.3%	n=20,873	+0.43 pips
Every other hour	48.9%	n=100,035	-0.13 pips

That is a real gap of 3.4 percentage points in favour of the overlap — one of the few cases where the standard advice survives measurement on direction, not just on liquidity.

Session	Closed higher	Sample
Sydney	49.8%	n=43,162
Tokyo	49.0%	n=46,912
London	49.8%	n=46,953
New York	49.8%	n=46,449

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 12:00 UTC — Silver (XAG/USD) closed higher 56.0% of 5,215 times there, far enough from a coin flip to be beyond chance. The weakest is 21:00 UTC, closing higher only 39.8% of 2,761 times.

Honesty note: some of the strongest buckets here sit at 21:00–22:00 UTC — the daily rollover, when spreads widen and liquidity thins. Our validation flagged exactly these hours as likely artifacts of the session boundary rather than tradeable edges. Treat them as trivia, not opportunity.

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:

Tuesday 20:00 UTC — closed lower 62.4% of 1,022 times (z=-7.6)
Wednesday 20:00 UTC — closed lower 62.2% of 1,027 times (z=-7.5)
Thursday 21:00 UTC — closed lower 64.7% of 601 times (z=-7.0) · rollover hour, see note above

Days and seasons

Weekday	Up-rate	Sample
Monday	49.0%	n=24,033
Tuesday	49.4%	n=24,412
Wednesday	49.7%	n=24,458
Thursday	49.2%	n=24,409
Friday	49.8%	n=21,922
Sunday	53.1%	n=1,674

Friday has been the friendliest day (49.8% of 21,922), Monday the least (49.0%). By calendar month, April leads at 50.0% and September trails at 47.7% — 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 after a realistic spread is charged. We ran that test across 4,248 rules on the whole board: 200 finished net positive — 4.7%.

Read "net positive" as a filter that was applied, not as evidence that survived. Those rules were chosen on the first 70% of the history and charged a spread on that same era, so the count above is the selection restated. Until September 2026 they were chosen on the whole history and then scored on its last third, which is not a holdout at all; we rebuilt the search and published the correction rather than quietly fixing it. The last 30% now selects nothing. The longest-standing clean holdout here is section 8 of the evidence page — windows picked on pre-2020 candles only, scored on 2020 onward — and it is worth +0.54 points in ordinary hours, which is less than a round trip.

1 of the published rules runs on Silver (XAG/USD), and it did not stay 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. 56.0% from 5,215 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. 16 years of "usually" contains every kind of "except when".

The guide walks through all four traps with live numbers.

Where Silver (XAG/USD) sits

Two things worth knowing before you treat any of the above as Silver (XAG/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:

Gold (XAU/USD) — +0.66 — a good deal of shape in common.
USD/CHF — +0.61 — a good deal of shape in common.
UK100 (FTSE) — +0.52 — 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 Silver (XAG/USD) itself moves beyond chance:

ICT New York kill zone (07:00-10:00 NY) - the second most important window.
Silver (XAG/USD): 53.3% in the window against 48.8% outside it, on 15,654 candles — z = 10.3.
The 4pm London fix hour behaves differently - the benchmark banks were fined for rigging.
Silver (XAG/USD): 53.5% in the window against 49.2% outside it, on 5,217 candles — z = 6.0.
The kill zones are the only hours worth trading.
Silver (XAG/USD): 50.2% in the window against 48.8% outside it, on 52,155 candles — z = 5.0.

What we have tested that covers Silver (XAG/USD)

Each of these is a claim this industry sells, measured against a control. ⚠ Only the ones whose measurement actually included Silver (XAG/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 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.
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.

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.

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