Which major paid cleanest London opens this quarter?
Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2026 11:55 pm
The quarter's over, so I went through my London open trades from July to September and ranked the four majors I trade by how clean the first ninety minutes after 07:00 were.
"Clean" is my own measure: the London open range break, defined on the 06:00 to 07:00 range, ran to at least 1.5 times the range size before returning to the range, with no more than one false break first. Not perfect, but it matches what I mean when I say a session was tradeable.
Results, out of 65 trading days:
EURUSD: 29 clean opens. The most consistent, as usual, though July was poor with only five clean days.
GBPUSD: 26 clean opens, but noticeably bigger moves on the clean days. A couple of the false breaks were vicious.
USDJPY: 22 clean opens. Several of the unclean days were down to BOJ-related headlines or Japanese commentary in the Asian session.
USDCHF: 17 clean opens. It moved less and false breaks were more common.
The surprise for me was how much difference the month made. In September, GBPUSD had 12 clean opens out of 22 days, better than EURUSD.
What I take from it: my default is still to focus on EURUSD at 07:00, but on days when GBPUSD has a narrow Asian range I'll give it priority. USDCHF is coming off my morning watchlist entirely.
"Clean" is my own measure: the London open range break, defined on the 06:00 to 07:00 range, ran to at least 1.5 times the range size before returning to the range, with no more than one false break first. Not perfect, but it matches what I mean when I say a session was tradeable.
Results, out of 65 trading days:
EURUSD: 29 clean opens. The most consistent, as usual, though July was poor with only five clean days.
GBPUSD: 26 clean opens, but noticeably bigger moves on the clean days. A couple of the false breaks were vicious.
USDJPY: 22 clean opens. Several of the unclean days were down to BOJ-related headlines or Japanese commentary in the Asian session.
USDCHF: 17 clean opens. It moved less and false breaks were more common.
The surprise for me was how much difference the month made. In September, GBPUSD had 12 clean opens out of 22 days, better than EURUSD.
What I take from it: my default is still to focus on EURUSD at 07:00, but on days when GBPUSD has a narrow Asian range I'll give it priority. USDCHF is coming off my morning watchlist entirely.