Globex, London and New York, and the narrower windows within them. Exact times for gold futures, why they matter, and what the evidence actually supports.
Gold trades nearly around the clock across three overlapping sessions. Globex and Asia run overnight. London runs from 4:00 to 8:20 AM Eastern. New York regular trading hours begin at 8:20 AM Eastern and the most active portion runs to around noon.
A kill zone is a narrower slice inside a session where participation has historically concentrated — typically the first hours of London and the period around the New York open. The idea is to trade when the most volume is transacting rather than throughout the day.
Volume and volatility genuinely do concentrate around session opens; that is measurable and uncontroversial. What is not established is any specific percentage claim about how much of the daily move happens in a given window. Those figures circulate widely and, as far as we can find, no public study quantifies them. Treat them as convention.
Gold futures open regular trading at 8:20 AM Eastern, not 9:30 — using equity market hours on a futures contract misaligns every session box. Contracts also roll, so watch the week before expiry in February, April, June, August, October and December. Volume migrates to the next contract before the front month expires, and a chart still on the old contract stops reflecting where the market actually is.
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