VWAP in spot FX is built from tick volume, and the result depends heavily on where you anchor it. The two common choices give quite different lines by mid-morning.
Midnight anchor (server or UTC): includes the Asian session. On EUR and GBP pairs the thin Asian ticks pull the line toward the overnight range, so by 09:00 London it often sits close to the Asian midpoint.
London open anchor (07:00 or 08:00 London): reflects only the session where most EUR and GBP volume trades. It reacts faster to the London move and tends to act as a cleaner pullback reference in the first hours.
A few practical points:
For USDJPY and AUD pairs, the Tokyo open can be the more sensible anchor.
Re-anchoring at the New York open helps for afternoon setups after a strong London trend.
Futures volume (6E, 6B) gives a VWAP that is independent of your broker's tick count, useful as a cross-check.
Which anchor do you use, and have you compared how often price respects each?
FXS Prop Desk wrote: Futures volume (6E, 6B) gives a VWAP that is independent of your broker's tick count
Good point, and it's the strongest argument for checking your anchor against futures before trusting either. Broker tick volume is really counting price updates, not size, so two brokers can draw visibly different VWAPs from the same session. Small thing to watch with 6E though: the CME session and daily reset don't line up with a London 07:00 anchor by default, so you'd need an anchored VWAP on the futures chart too, otherwise you're comparing two different anchors and calling it a feed difference. Also 6E is quoted the same way as EURUSD, but 6J is inverted versus USDJPY, which trips people up if they try the same check on yen.
Most broker servers sit two hours ahead of GMT in winter and three in summer, which puts server midnight at 22:00 London all year. The midnight line therefore starts inside the rollover, when spreads widen and the tick count gets noisy.
On a quiet Asian night those first few minutes of junk ticks carry real weight in the average. The London anchor is less exposed simply because the first hour has enough genuine activity to drown out anything odd.
On 07:00 versus 08:00, I anchor at 07:00 London for EURUSD because that is when Frankfurt is properly open. For GBPUSD I use 08:00, and the two lines are often only a pip or two apart by 10:00, but that matters when the pullback is shallow.
Fairman's caution about 6E applies here too, since the CME day starts at 17:00 Chicago. I set the futures anchor to the same London minute before judging whether the two feeds disagree.
Has anyone counted how often price respects each line in the first two hours? My rough tally on EURUSD favoured the London anchor, but the sample was small.
