Why every trader should know their personal worst hour

[Shadow Trader]

Statistics by hour reveal a surprising pattern for many scalpers: one specific hour consistently loses money.

Causes vary. Some people are tired late in the session. Others get pulled into a volatile period that does not suit the strategy. Some have a habit of taking one extra trade near the end of their window.

Finding the worst hour requires only a journal with timestamps and a simple pivot table after at least 150 trades. The pattern, once seen, is hard to ignore.

The fix is usually to stop trading that hour entirely. The saving is immediate, with no new skill needed.

A related exercise finds the best hour, and considers concentrating effort there.

The worst hour often shocks people who believed their results were consistent throughout the day.

Even a modest improvement, such as skipping that one hour, can lift monthly results without any change to the strategy itself.

Which hour is the worst in the journal here, and what is being done about it?

[Amanhasnoname]

Mine is the hour from 1pm to 2pm London time, and it took about 300 trades in the journal before I accepted it. It's the gap between the London morning move and the US data, and my breakout entries there kept getting chopped up. Over that sample it was the only hour with negative expectancy, and fairly clearly so.

What made it worse was that I often traded it out of boredom after a decent morning, which also meant I was giving back profits I had already made. Seeing the pivot table broken down by hour made that obvious in a way that just remembering it never did.

I now stop at 12:45 and come back for the US open, and I use the break for journal notes and lunch away from the screen. My best hour turned out to be the first 45 minutes of London, so I make sure I'm fully ready at my desk for that instead of spreading my attention across the whole day.