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Is Friday Really Worse Than Monday?

Mostly supported — the closest any folklore came to surviving whole.

The claim as it is usually statedMonday and Friday are the two worst days, and Friday is worse of the two.

Friday moves more than Monday in 11 of 19 markets, and the six markets that differ in direction all point the same way: Friday closes higher less often. Worth noting the source is honest about its basis — it says "from my experience", not "from the data".

What the data shows

Across 19 markets: direction: 6 of 19 markets differ beyond chance · movement: bigger in only 11 of 19. Median movement in the window, 113% of a normal hour.

MarketIn the windowRestzMovementSamples
NAS10051.0%53.9%-3.6107% of normal7,109
GBP/JPY49.6%51.1%-3.1113% of normal17,674
USD/JPY49.5%50.8%-2.7137% of normal19,574
SPX50052.0%54.1%-2.6114% of normal7,134
USD/CHF48.5%49.8%-2.2126% of normal13,754
EUR/JPY50.1%51.1%-2.2130% of normal22,437

Strongest six by statistical strength, whichever way they point. z measures how far from chance a result sits — we treat |z| ≥ 3 as significant, and print it even when it is nowhere near.

Who says it

Daily Price Action · TradingFinder

How this was measured

Every claim here reduces to a window on the clock or the calendar, so it can simply be checked. We compare the claimed window against the rest of the week on 23 years of hourly data across 19 markets, measuring two separate things the folklore tends to conflate: direction (does the window close higher more often?) via a two-proportion z-test, and movement (is the average move bigger or smaller?). A window can be perfectly ordinary in direction and genuinely quieter in movement — saying which is the entire point.

The bar here is |z| ≥ 2, deliberately more lenient than the |z| ≥ 3 this site applies to its own numbers: when testing someone else's claim, failing to reject it even at a lenient bar is the stronger statement.

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