The Tokyo close and the quiet hour before Frankfurt

[Fairman]

The Tokyo close and the quiet hour before Frankfurt

Between the end of the Tokyo session and the Frankfurt open there's a stretch that a lot of London focused traders never look at. Roughly 6:00 to 7:00 London time, a little different around the clock changes. Japanese desks are winding down, Europe hasn't properly started, and liquidity is about as thin as it gets on a weekday morning.

You don't have to trade it to get something from it. What happens in that hour often sets up the first move of the European morning.

A few things I'd look for on the floor before Frankfurt.

Has price drifted to one edge of the Asian range in that quiet hour? A slow drift towards the Asian high on thin volume often means the Frankfurt or London open will test it. Whether it breaks or gets rejected is the first decision of the day.

Did anything in Asia leave a level that the quiet hour hasn't touched? A spike on Japanese or Chinese data that was never revisited is a candidate for an early European test.

How wide is the spread on your pair right now? If it's still at Asian levels at 6:45, the broker isn't seeing much liquidity yet, and anything that happens before 7:00 deserves less weight.

Treat the hour as information rather than as a trading window. Price moves there tell you where the obvious stops are sitting before the real volume shows up.

[Fairman]

Yen pairs behave a bit differently in this window because the Japanese side of the market is just finishing rather than absent. USDJPY can still see some flow after the Tokyo close, especially near the end of a month or around Japanese holidays. EURUSD and GBPUSD, on the other hand, are often at their quietest. So the hour reads differently depending on the pair. A drift in USDJPY at 6:30 London might carry real flow, while the same drift on EURUSD is often just thin quotes moving around without much behind them. Month end in particular can make the yen side of that hour busier than usual.