Real, but named after the wrong end of itself.
The strongest of the four zones at 137%, elevated in 19 of 19. It is attributed to European desks squaring positions at the London close. But the daily peak sits at 10:00 New York — 1.50× a normal hour, at the start of the window, and the 4pm London fix at the other end runs only 118%. We expected the fix to be the cause and tested it: strip the fix hour out and the remainder is stronger, not weaker. The zone is the first hour after the New York equity open.
| Market | In the window | Rest | z | Movement | Samples |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| USD/CAD | 48.2% | 49.8% | -3.2 | 151% of normal | 11,820 |
| Silver (XAG/USD) | 50.6% | 49.3% | 2.6 | 116% of normal | 10,392 |
| NAS100 | 54.2% | 52.1% | 2.3 | 182% of normal | 3,396 |
| USD/JPY | 51.3% | 50.4% | 1.8 | 123% of normal | 9,106 |
| BTC/USD | 49.7% | 51.1% | -1.7 | 148% of normal | 4,300 |
| GER40 (DAX) | 52.5% | 51.3% | 1.7 | 131% of normal | 5,403 |
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.