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Is the London Kill Zone the Most Important Window?

No — it is an ordinary hour.

The claim as it is usually statedICT London kill zone (02:00-05:00 NY) sets the directional move for the day.

The London kill zone is taught as one of the most important windows in forex. It runs at 103% of a normal hour — three percent — and is elevated in fewer than half the markets. That is measured against a control which already contains the two genuinely busy zones, so it is not an artifact of an easy benchmark.

What the data shows

Across 19 markets: direction: 3 of 19 markets differ beyond chance · movement: bigger in only 9 of 19. Median movement in the window, 103% of a normal hour.

MarketIn the windowRestzMovementSamples
USD/CAD50.7%49.5%3.0103% of normal17,748
NZD/USD51.0%49.7%3.096% of normal15,462
GER40 (DAX)50.3%51.6%-2.1140% of normal8,023
EUR/GBP50.0%48.8%1.9141% of normal7,299
Silver (XAG/USD)48.9%49.5%-1.5114% of normal15,588
USD/CHF48.8%49.7%-1.5148% of normal9,667

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

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