"Trade the open" and "avoid lunch" are the two most repeated pieces of advice in futures, and neither is a statement about you. Your own record can say which hours have made and lost money in your hands — but only if the table is built carefully, because there are three ways to produce a time-of-day breakdown that looks authoritative and answers the wrong question.
1. Entry time, not exit time
A row labelled 10:00 can mean two entirely different things: trades you opened in that window, or trades you closed in it. The distinction is not academic. A trade entered at 09:15 and closed at 10:40 lands in a completely different row depending on the choice.
The decision you are examining is when you chose to open a position. That is the behaviour a time-of-day table exists to describe, and it is the one you can change tomorrow. A table that groups by exit time is mostly describing how long you held, which is a different question with its own answer.
If a journal does not say which it uses, the table cannot be read. The right label is on the table itself, in plain words: the 10:00 row is trades entered between 10:00 and 10:29, however long they were held.
2. Exchange time, not your time
For CME futures, 08:30 Chicago is the equity cash open. That is a real event in the market, and it happens at 08:30 whether you are in London, Phoenix or Sydney.
Bucket in your local time and that boundary stops being a fixed line. Twice a year you and the exchange change clocks on different dates, and for those weeks every trade lands one row out. The open smears across two buckets, and the row that was your best becomes your second best for reasons that have nothing to do with trading.
Chicago time: Asia 17:00–02:00, London 02:00–08:30, New York 08:30–15:00, after hours 15:00–17:00. These are not thirds of a day drawn for tidiness — they are the CME open, the London open, the US cash open and the cash close. A session breakdown built on anything else is describing a clock rather than a market.
3. Half hours, because the open is not one market
An hourly bucket puts 09:30 and 10:29 in the same row. On the US open those are different markets: the first minutes carry the volume and the range, and what follows is frequently a drift that behaves nothing like it. Averaged together they produce a row that describes neither.
Halving the window separates them. The cost is real and worth stating plainly: halving the window halves the sample in each row. A journal of 400 trades split across 48 half-hour buckets averages eight trades a row, and eight trades cannot support a win rate.
Read the count before the rate
This is where time-of-day analysis goes wrong most often. A bucket holding four trades will show 75% wins and a handsome average, and it means nothing at all — three good trades and one bad one.
| Window | Trades | Net | Win rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 08:30 | 96 | +$4,180 | 58% |
| 09:00 | 74 | −$1,320 | 47% |
| 13:30 | 4 | +$610 | 75% |
The 13:30 row has the best win rate on the table and is the only one you should ignore entirely. The two rows above it, with 96 and 74 trades behind them, are worth a conversation.
What to do with the answer
A weak hour is not automatically an hour to stop trading. It is a place to look. The common findings are mundane and fixable: the hour after the open is where a trader who has already had a loss goes looking for it back; the last half hour is where positions get held past the point anyone would open one.
It is also worth checking whether the pattern is really about the clock. Trades taken later in a session are, by definition, taken after earlier ones — and how a trade sits in the sequence of a day often explains more than the hour on it. If your worst window is also where your third and fourth trades of the day live, the finding may be about accumulation rather than about the time.
Or have it cut for you
Choptick breaks the same journal down by hour, half hour and session — all on entry time, in exchange time, with the trade count on every row — alongside cuts by weekday, instrument, setup, hold time and where the trade fell in the day. Every table says what it buckets on.
See ChoptickFigures in the examples are invented and illustrative. Nothing here is financial advice.