Session behaviour: Asia, London, New York

Asia: range and repair

The Asian session is typically the quietest, with narrower ranges and thinner liquidity. Moves initiated here often fade, and spreads at some brokers are meaningfully wider. For most systematic gold strategies this session is better used for position management than for initiating new risk.

London: the directional session

London brings the largest step-change in participation. Ranges expand, spreads tighten, and the session frequently establishes the day's directional bias. It is also where false breakouts of the Asian range are most common in the first hour — a pattern stable enough to be worth explicitly handling rather than accidentally trading.

New York: overlap, data and reversal

• —The London–New York overlap is the deepest liquidity window of the day and the safest place to transact size.
• —Most high-impact US data lands early in this session, producing the day's sharpest moves.
• —Late New York often reverses part of the day's extension as London desks close out.
• —The rollover window near the session's end carries the widest spreads of the twenty-four hours.

Rollover, the daily reset and the worst hour to transact

Around the daily rollover, liquidity providers step back, spreads widen dramatically and swap is applied. It is comfortably the most expensive hour of the twenty-four to open or close a position, and any strategy indifferent to the clock will eventually pay for that indifference in a way no backtest with fixed spreads ever showed.

Encode a rollover exclusion

• —Identify the exact rollover window in your broker's server time.
• —Block new entries across it as a hard rule.
• —Expect wider stops to be filled unfavourably if they sit near price during it.
• —Remember that Wednesday carries triple swap on most gold contracts.

Building session rules that survive daylight saving

Session logic anchored to a broker's server clock silently shifts twice a year, and the shifts in the US and Europe are three weeks apart — which produces two annual windows where the mapping between server time and market session is wrong in a way most systems never notice.

Anchor to the market, not the terminal