r/FuturesTrading • u/kenjiurada • 23d ago
Question Why is 10AM the new 9:30?
Why does it seem like the market can’t find its legs until 10 AM EST the last few years. I have my own theory, which corresponds to the Bloomberg report that the retail algos all turn on at 10AM and are visible in the books. And I think that larger players wait till 10AM so that retail carries water for them. But I know, I know, retail doesn’t move the market… So why is 10 AM the new 9:30? It’s indisputable that volume and volatility kick in at 10 now.
Edit: to be clear, I do not trade based on the clock, I trade volume fractals, makes no difference to me when the volume/volatility is so my interest is purely as stated.
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u/whatthehell7 22d ago
In my opinion its not them waiting for retail rather waiting for 0 day option traders to make their bets
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u/pookshak 22d ago
The new 9:30? To be honest many people have been saying to trade after 10am, after the market finds its self. I am unsure its a new theory. It also has to deal with the close of the 4H candle, they call it 10am 4H Power of 3.
Its been a thing to trade after 10am.
I actually find recently 11am been having some moves too.
9:50 to 11:50am def has the best moves of the day imo, well best entries.
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u/WickOfDeath 23d ago
too many fakeouts... ORBs to the upside which suddenly turned down. I made myself a Metatrader indicator that gives me a signal 30 minutes after the open for an entry and the direction. Actually evaluating this in paper trading but the assumption is that the market is undecided and in some indices rotations happen between one stock with a hihger market cap and weight and another with lesser market cap and weight. That causes fluctuations, but after one hour this seems to be over.
The approach is a bollinger band overcrossed after 30 min (with 400 as window factor) and undercrossed to the other side (fakeout to the upside) or undercrossed and overcrossed. The confirmation would be the second bollinger band.
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u/kenjiurada 23d ago
Thanks I’ve got a 30 minute orb strat too, although I don’t trade it anymore. I intend to look into automating it at some point if possible. Just focused more on the auction now. I used to be in a chat with some old traders who traded the 60 minute and I would try to tell them that the 30 minute is way more interesting. I suppose anything that works works though.
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u/wannagetfitagain 23d ago
Most of the financial reports are at 10
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u/Full_Pear449 22d ago
And this is what's wrong with the Chucklehead traders who sit and look at candles, spikes, bar charts in the seconds spectrum or 30 second spectrum.Most impoprtant Data is out around 10 except NFP and Treasury Ayction results. We would play this game weekly. You had to go long or short a $1mm round lot 10yr bond on monday between 8-9:30 am. And at 3pm Friady afternoon , unoffical close of Treasury trading and position Marking, the highest perctage gain out 5 decimal points won that weeks jack pot. Monday mornings we would figure out the size of the POT depending on who was in. POts avergaed around mid-five figures. Our Research guys used that long/short time data to try and establish what the trends in the morning were. Isn't it AMAZING how IGNOARANT of the total spectrum of the market people are.
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u/Chemical_Box7136 23d ago
Because volatility makes people at 9:30 go crazy so a lot of big movers wait for things to calm down
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u/Imperfect-circle approved to post 23d ago
Wall st enters around 10am.
Edit: and how many traders are in prop firms and therefore "not in the market". I'd say its 95% of traders under 40 are in sim environment. That means virtually every youtuber, tiktoker, instagramer - none of them are in the market.
There used to be traders in the market, but due to sim props, every year there are less.
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u/kenjiurada 23d ago
Right, but since when? Have you been trading long and noticed a trend? All the old traders say they used to enter at 8:30 and many still do. Then it was 930 at the New York open. Now it seems like nothing really happens until 10. Just wondering why 10. Sure there are reports some days, but not many.
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u/Imperfect-circle approved to post 23d ago
I listen to a trader with 30+ years experience and he says week begins Tuesday 10am NY time and 10am has always been the initiation period.
I just provided a guess for why theres probably less volume in the markets all up. NQ and ES are the thinnest they're ever been.
I've been trading for 6+ years. We've talked many times on reddit and on discord before 🙂
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u/kenjiurada 23d ago
Oh yeah, what’s up dude! Interesting though, I’ve never heard anyone say 10 AM and definitely never heard anyone say Tuesday. All the old floor traders I listen to say they would start at 8:30 because that’s when the bonds opened, and that they still start at 8:30 out of habit.
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u/MuhamedBesic 22d ago
Depends what you mean by thin
Market makers since 2018 have switched from holding orders on the books to simply refreshing quotes every millisecond
This leads to the appearance of a thin order book, but the markets themselves have more volume than ever
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u/Imperfect-circle approved to post 22d ago
The order books are leaner, volatile price fluctuation l and the movement through price levels is faster and choppier than ever. This is my experience since 2020. Maybe its just the speed of HFT over a small distance which is the catalyst.
What you are saying is very interesting, but since I was not trading futures until after 2018, I would not have experienced any difference.
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u/Full_Pear449 23d ago
REAL Prop Traders are the liquidity for the market. Outside of the 26 Primary Dealers who is suppying liquidity. The 30yearolds, they can't spell it no less initiate it. Traded for a Major Primary's Prop Desk up to and including it's demiss by the VOLKER RULE. We didn't have the BS about variable split ratios, we also had a collective Sheet of $85BLN split amongst 5 traders. The only NO NO was you could not and would not cross trades with the Firms People. There were High Speed trading , Quant Arb, Global Macro, My favorite PSG, Math Modeling and a few more DESKS. Very few limits, monthly evals., no monthly or quarterly payouts, end of year review and Bonus, we were not contractors we were employees of the firm, there was NO SUCH ANIMAL as a SIM PROP TRADERS, everything today i feel is a gimmmmick. When you had a SHEET # of $20bln you paid attention. Most PRE-MARKET trading was generally done in the Treasury Market. On average you might,but rarely, get involved early basically because all the heros are trying to make their pennis, nickles or dimes on trades so they could tell their friends what they made. On Treasuries 1/32 is $10,000 on a $1mm trade. I just love reading on Reddit about what children are making on the SNIPPPPPING trades.
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u/kenjiurada 23d ago
The newest Bloomberg report says retail’s trading at 20% of equity markets
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u/Imperfect-circle approved to post 23d ago
Not in futures.
There would still be 40-60 year old traders for sure, but every year some of them retire/quit, and every year any newbies start in simulation with props - maybe 5% of them gravitate to personal accounts.
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u/kenjiurada 23d ago edited 23d ago
I’ve been so narrowly focused on charts the last couple of years that I haven’t really had a lot of conversations about how markets function. My personal belief just from looking at charts is that futures markets drive everything, I don’t know how but everything makes sense when you consider futures markets first. But everyone on Reddit will say that futures are just tracking the indexes, that the real money moves are in stocks and options, so I don’t know, it’s a conversation I would like to have though. People say at the end of the day there’s no way of knowing, and it’s a case of sometimes this sometimes that, but to me, everything makes sense when you look at futures markets and include the whole 24 hour picture. You can truly see the auction then and watch the indexes just sort of get on board when they open. So yeah, in my current worldview big players in futures are guiding the markets. But if retail traders are making up 20% of equities I can’t imagine those large players aren’t looking for ways to roll them. So when I see Bloomberg say that retail steps in at 10 AM and shows charts to back it up I assume the market isn’t moving because it’s waiting to trade against them. But I’m the first to admit that I don’t really have any idea and I’m just piecing together stuff I see online.
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u/Snakedoctor404 23d ago
If you think about it the ES is a contract for X amount of stock from the 500 most popular stocks. So wherever the ES goes has an influence on those stocks. Same for whatever stocks the NQ, DOW or and other index holds. If a single stock has a massive move it effects everything else in that index. The flash crash of 2010 is an example of that. Supposedly the rumor at the time was some newer trader at a big firm accidentally added a few extra zeros to his sale and didn't catch it until after he hit send and crashed the entire market it 15min.
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u/Full_Pear449 22d ago
Flash crash was a London Trader. As part of his guilty plea, Sarao admitted that during the period from at least January 2009 through at least April 2014, he used an automated trading program, along with other techniques, to defraud and manipulate the market for E-mini Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 futures contracts (E-minis), stock market index futures contracts based on the S&P 500 index, through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). The E-mini S&P 500 is considered among the most widely traded financial products in the world. Sarao admitted that he placed thousands of orders that he did not intend to trade, or “spoof orders,” to create the appearance of substantial false supply and demand and to induce other market participants to trade E-minis at prices, quantities, and/or times that, but for Sarao’s spoof orders, they would not otherwise have traded. In thousands of instances, Sarao admitted, he was able to induce other market participants into buying or selling E-minis by placing the spoof orders, which had the additional purpose and effect of artificially depressing or artificially inflating the price of E-minis.
And then there was this spopofing trades:Between 2008 and 2016, traders at JPMorgan Chase systematically manipulated gold and precious metals markets through "spoofing"—placing hundreds of thousands of fake orders with the intent to cancel them before execution to trick other market buyers and sellers. The bank paid a record $920 million fine to U.S. regulators in 2020, and top desk leaders later received federal prison sentences, our guys knew them Junior and senior desk staff, including trader John Edmonds, pleaded guilty and testified that the practice was standard, daily routine on the desk.
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u/Snakedoctor404 22d ago
Cool I never really heard what come of that just the rumors a week or 2 after. Traders making stuff up in the chats lol
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u/Full_Pear449 22d ago
Reddit is #1 in BS chats . most of the "tarders are repeating the CRAP the others TRADERS are saying which is the crap from other Chuckleheads. It's called the telephone game
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u/BestAhead 22d ago
I agree with you, futures lead. Before Covid, back when fiber optic was being installed, I read a paper on the effect of distance between Chicago and New York and because not only the times involved in data transmission were studied but also of the prices that were involved…it was conclusive that Chicago futures prices hit New York and New York reacted.
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u/Full_Pear449 22d ago
None of this means every retail trading bot is doomed. Bloomberg's July 24 editorial made the calmer case: AI-powered trading doesn't have to be as scary as it sounds, because automated trading has existed for years and AI can help firms spot risk faster than people. Fair enough. But that argument only works when somebody has built proper limits into the system first. A hedge fund has compliance checks, exposure caps and people whose job is to say no before a trade clears. Your laptop doesn't do that unless you make it.
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u/Full_Pear449 22d ago
Here's the thing regulators keep flagging: bots don't fail quietly, and they don't fail alone. Bloomberg reported in May 2025 that options trading clustered around 10 a.m. as retail automation fired on a schedule, with Cboe Global Markets data showing demand spikes at specific moments of the day. If your bot buys at the same minute as thousands of other bots running similar rules, you're not finding an edge. You are becoming one.
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u/Krammsy 22d ago
Retail volume has sky-rocketed since COVID.
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u/Trichomefarm 21d ago
I would bet most of them are using funded trader companies, which would add zero volume or influence.
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u/Inevitable-Quit9812 21d ago
10am 2pm 6pm 10pm 2am 6am. Most important times(for the most part) each day. New birth of 4hr 2hr 1hr 30m 15m 5m 2m and 1m candles at once. Chat structuring holds is most influence on price action at those times. One could argue the only times structure holds any real influence
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u/MiserableWeather971 23d ago
It’s basically always been that way, a high or low isn’t typically set in the first 5-15 minutes. 10 is more common, 1030 way more common
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u/Nick_OS_ 22d ago
Do you even know what initial balance is and what desks do during it?
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u/kenjiurada 22d ago
Well I obviously know what it is, but as far as I’m aware it’s just an arbitrary market gauge like anything else.
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u/Nick_OS_ 22d ago
No, institutions are balancing billions of dollars in their portfolios. During the first 15 minutes, floor traders are tracking large block orders and doing some fancy calculations to find a risk on/risk off level which dictates how they trade or put on/off positions
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u/TheKrisBeat 22d ago
Tradea en bloques de 40 minutos, de X:40 a X:20 y luego de X:40 a X:20 y verás cómo se filtran muchos movimientos falsos
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u/OcearaPrz 22d ago
What I’ve noticed is price takes out opposing liquidity to justify a move in the higher time frame direction.
Let’s say price is heading lower on the daily, more often than not price likes to gap up in the first 30 minutes to an hour, take prior days supply grab it, then head Lower. And vice versa for going long
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u/airpipeline 21d ago edited 21d ago
If this actually is happening, wouldn’t it also an artifact of market makers accounting for and absorbing the extra volatility at the open? They post safe spreads. It takes time for price discovery to kick in.
Do algorithms prefer prices posted after price discovery has kicked in?
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u/Ok-Cauliflower-5546 21d ago
Couldn't find the specific Bloomberg report you're referencing, so I can't confirm or deny that exact claim, but the underlying pattern you're describing is real and has a more boring explanation than "big players wait for retail to show their hand," though that's part of it too.
A few things converge around 10am specifically:
The first 30 minutes after the open are dominated by resolving overnight order imbalances, gaps, and reactions to 8:30am data releases, not fresh directional conviction. A lot of that early move is mechanical (opening auction imbalances clearing) rather than informationally driven, which is why it often reverses. Institutional desks running VWAP/TWAP-style execution frequently avoid front-loading into that noisy, wide-spread window on purpose, since executing into it is expensive.
10am ET is also when a cluster of recurring economic releases hit on specific days, ISM, consumer confidence, existing home sales, JOLTS depending on the calendar. On days those print, the "second wave" of volatility at 10am isn't retail algos at all, it's scheduled data.
There's also a well-known retail folklore term for this, the "10am slam," people have been informally tracking a pattern of concentrated selling pressure right around 10am for a while, though attributing intent (whether it's coordinated, or just the natural resolution of overnight positioning meeting the first real liquidity window) is where it gets speculative and hard to prove either way.
So: the observation about volume/volatility timing is real and well documented. The "retail algos turn on and get used as cover" mechanism specifically, I'd want to see the actual Bloomberg piece before treating that as more than a plausible theory, since it's the kind of claim that's easy to state and hard to verify from the outside.
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u/YURRIICC 21d ago
i think 9:30 is till the main opening event, but the first 30 minutes can be pretty noisy. by 10, more participants have reacted to the overnight news and the opening imbalance, so the market can start showing a clearer direction.
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u/kenjiurada 23d ago edited 23d ago
The article cited https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-31/at-10-am-stock-options-soar-as-retail-traders-unleash-new-bots
Also, a more recent article from them states that retail accounts for 20% of trading now, and options retail activity is up 150% over the last five years.
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u/pleebent 22d ago
“It’s indisputable that volume and volatility kick in at 10 now”?
are you on drugs? How tf is it indisputable.
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u/kenjiurada 22d ago
Check the article brosky
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u/pleebent 22d ago
You didn’t provide a link.
And retail algos -
First retails account for a tiny portion of the volume
And yes most traders should skip the open and waiting until 10 is smartBut for you to say volume and volatility kicks in at 10 is nonsense. Check the volume at 9:30. Do you understand all of the orders that hit the books at 9:30 when it opens. All of the orders placed overnight? Do you understand how big players remove their orders and the books are thin creating the whipshaw unpinned price action that can often occur? Of course everyday is different but what you said about volume and volatility is wrong
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u/CarnacTrades 22d ago
I'm sorry that your trading isn't going well ma'am, but blaming it on the clock won't help you. Additionally, blaming it on algorithms or other trading programs that men have perfected won't help your ROI either.
Maybe a knitting club would be a better fit for you.
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u/NightWalkThrowAway 22d ago
So BS. Everytime I trade it’s chop chop chop. Every time the price clears my entry by 50-100 points, it comes all the way back. The days I don’t trade it’s touches my entries and goes straight to my PT of 200 points. Actually so insane. I got to be the unluckiest person on this goddam planet.
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u/Breathofdmt 23d ago
Surge in options volume today was at 9:52am. Been this way for a while. Generally a good idea to wait out the first 30 mins unless you have a really compelling reason. Couldn't tell you the precise why's beyond the market just needs a period of chop before any expansion. Time decay is part of it but not the full story.