Best time of day to trade: read your own P&L by hour

Ask which hour is best to trade futures and you get general answers about the open and the lunch lull. The hour that matters is the one that makes or loses money for you, and it is already in your trade history.

• Group your trades by hour and look at total net P&L, average net P&L and the trade count together.
• Trust the count first: an hour with 6 trades says little, however red or green it is.
• Pick entry time to judge when you decide to trade; exit time mixes in how long you hold.
• Fix your timezone: daylight saving moves the New York open for traders outside the US.

How to read P&L by hour

Put every trade into the clock hour it started in, 9:00 to 9:59, 10:00 to 10:59 and so on, and compute for each hour:

• Number of trades. Read this first. It decides how much the other numbers mean.
• Total net P&L. What the hour did to your account. An hour you trade a lot can lose the most money while being only slightly negative per trade.
• Average net P&L per trade. Whether a trade in that hour is worth taking. This is the hour's expectancy.
• Win rate. Useful next to the average, not on its own: a 70% hour can still lose money if its losers are large.

A worked example

Three months of a trader's MNQ trades, by entry hour in New York time, net of commission:

The 8:00 hour has the best average, but on six trades one good morning explains it: it is a reason to watch that hour, not to trade more of it. The 9:00 hour, which includes the 9:30 open, is positive on 48 trades and carries the account. The 10:00 hour is busiest and barely pays. 11:00 loses $1,110 over 37 trades, and that is the hour to test first: cut it for a month and see whether the total improves. The 13:00 hour looks worst per trade, but nine trades are not enough to say so.

Note what the 9:00 row hides. With clock hours, 9:00 to 9:29 before the cash open and 9:30 to 9:59 after it are one bucket. If you trade both, check the trades in that hour by hand before deciding which half pays.

Sample size

Splitting your trades into hours divides your sample by however many hours you trade, so each hour has far fewer trades than your whole history. A rough guide: below about 20 trades, an hour's average is a hint. Before you act on an hour, check two things:

• Without its extremes. Remove the hour's best and worst trade. If the sign flips, one trade was the result.
• In two halves. Compare the first half of your history with the second. An hour that is bad in both is a pattern; one that is bad in only one may have been a few rough days.

Sessions, entry time and exit time

Futures trade nearly around the clock, so the hours you trade fall into different sessions with different volume: the overnight hours, the European morning, and the US morning around the 9:30 a.m. New York stock market open. If you trade overnight and in the US morning, read them as separate groups; mixing them hides a profitable session behind a losing one.

Bucket by entry time to answer "when should I take trades". Bucket by exit time to see when the money actually lands; a trade entered at 10:55 and held for 20 minutes is an 11:00 trade by exit. For most day traders the two views are close, and where they differ, entry time is the one to act on.

Timezones and daylight saving

Hours only mean something in one fixed timezone. The US moves its clocks on the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November; the UK and the EU move on the last Sundays of March and October. For a few weeks each spring and autumn, the gap between New York and London is four hours instead of five, so the 9:30 New York open falls at 13:30 London time instead of 14:30. If you live in Europe and group trades by your local hour, those weeks put your open trades in the wrong bucket.

The simplest fix, if most of your trading is around the US open, is to read your hours in New York time. The cost is that your days, on a calendar, then also start and end at New York midnight.

Where Blindspot shows it

• Time of Day Analysis (Analytics): average P&L by hour, average P&L by day of the week, a heatmap of hour against weekday, and tables with each hour's and each weekday's trades, total P&L, average P&L and win rate. All P&L is net of commission and fees.
• Entry time or exit time: the Bucket by switch above the charts.
• Period and account: the period filter (all time, the year to date, a year or a month) and the account selector narrow the analysis, so you can compare two months or keep a sim account out.
• Your timezone: hours, weekdays and Calendar days are in the timezone set in Settings → Display → Timezone. Changing it regroups your stored trades; it doesn't change when they happened.
• The trades behind an hour: Blindspot doesn't list them from the chart. Use the Trades list, or ask ChatGPT or Claude through the MCP connection for "my trades entered between 11:00 and 12:00 New York time last month".

Blindspot does not mark sessions or split the 9:00 hour at the open; hours are whole clock hours.

Frequently asked questions

More guides

Expectancy and profit factor, how to spot tilt in your own trades, MAE and MFE, and every guide.