Stats › Intraday and market microstructure › High and low timing
49% of US stock highs land in the first hour, not 25.7%
Sources: Bulkowski for the stock figure, TradingStats for the two futures figures, both private studies. The baseline is the arcsine law for a 6.5 hour session. Different instruments, different decades, different session definitions, so read these as four separate measurements and not as a trend.
The high and low of a trading day cluster at the open in every published sample. In 55 US stocks the high landed in the first hour on 49% of days, against 25.7% for a random walk. The final hour delivers fewer extremes than chance.
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