When the price actually moves — hour by hour

When the price actually moves — hour by hour

That “the afternoon is the liveliest part of the trading day” is something you read everywhere. This chart measures it: for every hour it shows the typical price movement against the previous hour, in basis points — from around 12,172 hourly pairs per metal. The darker, the more happens.

The result is the same for all five metals: the strongest movement sits between 16:00 and 17:00 CET — when London and New York trade at the same time. For gold the price is then typically 21.1 basis points away from the previous hour, in the calmest hour only 9.1 — that is 2.3 times as much. Anyone placing a large order meets the most liquid, but also the most restless market in the afternoon.

Our own price records, hourly values from 29/08/2024 to 06/11/2026, weekdays only. Shown is the median of the absolute hourly change, not the mean: individual catch-up jumps after a recording gap would lift a mean several times over. Hatched, and held out of every high and low, are the hours 00, 01, 02 CET for each metal — there the price sits at the edge of our recording window and repeats in up to every second record. A “calmest hour” drawn from those values would describe our measurement, not the market. For individual metals further hours are added (23 CET); the hatching therefore sits per row. A basis point is one hundredth of a per cent. What is measured is the movement from hour to hour, not the traded volume — high movement and high liquidity usually, but not always, coincide. Summer and winter time are accounted for.