The short answer
None held up. Gold's Asian-hours drift, the best session for gold, silver and oil, and the turn of the month on US indices all failed out of sample. One FX result looked like a strong pass (buying from 22:00 to 07:00 UTC was positive every year on six pairs) but it was an artifact of the rollover spread spike at 22:00 UTC; starting one hour later left nothing. The FX month-end fix reversal is on a watch list: strong in 2024-26, flat in 2021-24.
What we tested
- Markets
- XAUUSD, XAGUSD, US oil; EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY, AUDUSD, USDCAD, USDCHF, NZDUSD, EURJPY, GBPJPY; US500, US100, US30
- Period
- Dec 2020 to Oct 2026; best session chosen on 2021-23 and judged on 2024-26
- Session drift: hold each market through one block of the day (Asia 22-07, London 07-12, New York 12-17, late 17-22 UTC); pick each market's best block on 2021-23, trade it every weekday in 2024-26.
- Gold Asian drift: buy at 00:00 UTC, sell at 07:00 UTC.
- Turn of the month: buy US indices at the close of the fifth-last trading day, sell at the close of the third trading day of the next month.
Results
| Pattern | Result |
|---|---|
| Gold Asian drift | -0.04R (2021-24), +0.05R, +0.00R; did not reliably beat random days |
| Best session, gold / silver | lost in every validation year (t -2.4 / -3.8) |
| Turn of the month, US indices | -0.06R, -0.14R, +0.16R; 0 of 3 indices positive in 2021-24 |
| FX 'Asia 22-07' long | nominal pass; rollover-spread artifact (gone from 23:00) |
| FX month-end 4 pm fix reversal | 2021-24 -0.01R; year 1 +0.17R; year 2 +0.11R: watch list |
What it means
- The artifact: our prices are bid prices, and at 22:00 UTC the broker's spread widens for rollover, pushing the bid down for a few minutes. The whole 'drift' sat in the first 20 minutes (+2.2 to +6.7 basis points) and long and short the dollar won at the same time, which a real currency effect cannot do.
- Lesson for anyone testing time-of-day effects: move the entry off the rollover minute and check that the effect survives.
Limits of this test
- Session blocks are coarse (four a day); finer windows were not searched to avoid overfitting.
Frequently asked questions
Does gold go up in the Asian session?
Buying gold from 00:00 to 07:00 UTC lost money in 2021-24 and was about flat since, and it did not reliably beat random days in our test with real costs.
How every test on these pages works
- Prices: the broker's own bars from an FTMO cTrader account. Fills are simulated minute by minute on one-minute bars; when one minute touches both the stop and the target, the stop is assumed to fill first.
- Costs: the broker's bid/ask spread measured by hour of day, commission per market, and the broker's own overnight swap rates for anything held past the daily rollover.
- Periods: year 1 = 24 Oct 2024 to 23 Oct 2025, year 2 = 24 Oct 2025 to 24 Oct 2026. Daily rules also use Dec 2020 to Oct 2024 ("2021-24"). Rules are written down before testing and are not tuned on the period that judges them.
- Controls: every rule is compared with entries that have no reason behind them (random sides, random days, or the same rule at fake levels), so a result has to beat chance, not just be positive.
- R is the trade's risk (entry to stop). An average of +0.10R means the average trade made a tenth of what it risked; -0.10R means it lost a tenth.
The full results for the rules RezSync Algo trades, by market and risk profile with every trade downloadable, are in the backtest report.
Published research
Related research
Research, not financial advice. These are simulated results on historical prices: they involve no real money, are produced with hindsight of the rules, and past results do not predict future ones. Costs and fills are modelled, and your broker's prices and costs will differ. Trading leveraged products carries a high risk of losing money; test on a demo account first.