When does Gold (XAU/USD) actually rise?

Every hour below is a real measurement: how often Gold (XAU/USD) closed higher than it opened in that hour of the week, across 140,916 hourly bars. Not signals — base rates, with the sample size on every figure.

When does Gold (XAU/USD) actually move?

Gold (XAU/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.

A typical hour in Gold (XAU/USD) ends up 11 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 (Thursday 21:00) moves 4.7. 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, Gold (XAU/USD)'s biggest windows were still 2.11× a typical hour on data the selection had never seen, at 0.876 rank correlation across the week and 0.943 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 Gold (XAU/USD), from 140,916 hourly bars:

The gap is 0.5 percentage points — inside what chance produces at these sample sizes. On direction alone, the overlap is not a better bet for Gold (XAU/USD) 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 — Gold (XAU/USD) closed higher 58.2% of 4,662 times there, far enough from a coin flip to be beyond chance. The weakest is 21:00 UTC, closing higher only 43.4% of 3,466 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:

• Tuesday 21:00 UTC — closed lower 61.0% of 771 times (z=-6.6) · rollover hour, see note above
• Wednesday 22:00 UTC — closed higher 61.2% of 978 times (z=6.4) · rollover hour, see note above
• Tuesday 20:00 UTC — closed lower 56.9% of 1,210 times (z=-5.5)

Days and seasons

Friday has been the friendliest day (51.4% of 25,550), Tuesday the least (50.4%). By calendar month, February leads at 51.7% and June trails at 49.9% — 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%.

1 of the published rules runs on Gold (XAU/USD), 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. 58.2% from 4,662 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. 19 years of "usually" contains every kind of "except when".

The guide walks through all four traps with live numbers.

Where Gold (XAU/USD) sits

Two things worth knowing before you treat any of the above as Gold (XAU/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:

• Silver (XAG/USD) — +0.66 — a good deal of shape in common.
• USD/CHF — +0.62 — a good deal of shape in common.
• UK100 (FTSE) — +0.59 — 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 Gold (XAU/USD) itself moves beyond chance:

• The Sunday open gaps and spreads are wide - wait for Tokyo.
  Gold (XAU/USD): 54.2% in the window against 50.6% outside it, on 1,968 candles — z = 3.1.

What we have tested that covers Gold (XAU/USD)

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

Open Gold (XAU/USD)'s strongest hour in the dashboard →