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Calculating R by hour of day is easy in a spreadsheet, and it's one of the more useful views of a trade log.

Columns in the trade log:

• Entry time in London time, result in R, setup tag.
• A helper column that extracts the hour: =HOUR(entry time).

Then a pivot table with hour as rows and sum, average and count of R as values.

What to look for in the output:

• Whether one hour carries most of the profit. For London scalpers that's often the 08:00 hour.
• Hours with an average near zero, which are paying only for costs.
• Late-morning hours that are negative except on US data days, which is worth splitting out.

The count column matters more than people think. An hour with five trades and a high average means nothing. As a rough guide, don't draw conclusions from fewer than 30 trades in a cell.

You can also split by setup tag to see if some setups work at different hours.

Make sure all times are in the same time zone. Broker statements often use server time, usually set two or three hours ahead of London; convert first. Daylight saving changes are an easy source of off-by-one-hour errors.

Does anyone use a different breakdown, like minutes since the open?