How do trading sessions affect signals?

What are trading sessions?

Forex, gold and index markets run almost 24 hours, but activity is not even. Money concentrates around the working hours of three major financial centres:

• Asia session: Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong.
• London session: Europe.
• New York session: the United States.

The window when London and New York are both open usually has the highest liquidity and volatility. The transitions, when one session has closed and the next has not opened, are usually thinner.

AURORA’s default session windows, in local exchange time and in UTC:

Europe and the US change clocks on different dates, so for a few weeks each year the gap shifts by an extra hour.

Why do sessions affect signals?

• Liquidity. Busy sessions have tighter spreads and better fills; in quiet hours a single large order can move price.
• Volatility. Breakouts during London or New York tend to follow through more than breakouts in the middle of the night.
• News. Major US and European economic releases land at the start of these sessions.
• Relative volume. Evening volume is always higher than midday volume in Asia; volume should be compared with the same time of day, not with the daily average.

Common misunderstandings

• Session hours are fixed on the clock. In local time zones outside Europe and the US, London and New York shift by an hour between summer and winter.
• London is always the best session. It depends on the symbol: gold, US indices and Asian currency pairs each have different “good” hours.
• Crypto follows sessions like forex. Crypto trades continuously and is less clearly session-driven.
• Filtering out a bad session after a few trades. Small samples mislead; filtering on short history is a form of overfitting.

Chart example

Illustration of the default windows in Vietnam time (UTC+7) during European / US summer time, with the Score mode points.

How does AURORA use sessions?

AURORA defines each session in the time zone of its financial centre (Tokyo, London, New York), so daylight saving is handled automatically. Sessions apply only to intraday charts.

The four modes of the Session mode box:

Defaults by market:

• AURORA Standard V12.2: FOREX uses Score, CFD and CRYPTO use Stats only, STOCK is off.
• AURORA Pro V15.4: the Session mode box defaults to Auto (by Market Preset), with the same result. You can pick a specific mode to override it under any preset, for example Filter for a funded account.

Display:

• The dashboard (when not in Mini layout) has one row per session: trade count, win rate, total R and average R. A ● marks the current session.
• The signal label tooltip names the session at entry.
• Setups blocked by session show a ⛔ label with the session as the reason.

Do not over-filter

• Enough trades before filtering. Each session needs enough trades. Let Stats only run long enough, and recheck on a different period.
• A session is a proxy, not a cause. Poor results in one session may come from news or a particular market phase.
• Holidays and special hours. Holiday liquidity is very different from a normal day in the same hours.
• Blocking sessions cuts trade count. Compare average R, total R and drawdown before keeping a filter. Historical results, before costs.