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Are ICT Kill Zones Real?

Yes — the framework holds in all 19 markets.

The claim as it is usually statedThe kill zones are the only hours worth trading.

The four kill zones together run at 136% of normal movement in every single market we tested, without exception — the most uniform result in this whole catalogue. Traders who restrict themselves to these hours really are trading the busiest parts of the day. The honest deflation: the zones cover 10 of 24 hours, so part of this is simply that the middle of the day beats the middle of the night.

What the data shows

Across 19 markets: direction: 4 of 19 markets differ beyond chance · movement: genuinely bigger in 19 of 19. Median movement in the window, 136% of a normal hour.

MarketIn the windowRestzMovementSamples
NZD/USD50.7%49.3%5.0119% of normal51,535
Silver (XAG/USD)50.3%48.8%5.0135% of normal51,939
ETH/USD48.9%50.4%-3.3118% of normal20,521
AUD/USD50.3%49.7%2.3119% of normal57,292
EUR/JPY50.4%50.9%-1.9136% of normal52,223
USD/CAD49.9%49.4%1.9142% of normal59,147

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

TradingFinder · EBC Financial

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.

Check any hour yourself →

Free on the four major pairs, with the full 23 years and the sample size on every number.