NYC's Trading Hours Still Dominate Bitcoin Markets

Crypto markets are often touted as being 'always-on' and 'borderless', but a recent analysis of Bitcoin price data shows that this is not entirely true. A TradingView user named nonsanchart analyzed 1000 hours of BTC-USDT data, sorting each hourly candle into 24 buckets by hour of the UTC day and averaging the range of each bucket.

The results show that the busiest hour for Bitcoin trading is 14:00 UTC, with an average range of 0.342%, while the quietest hour is 20:00 UTC, with an average range of 0.115%. This pattern suggests that the market is influenced by traditional financial markets in New York.

The analysis also found that there are three distinct 'bumps' in trading volume throughout the day, corresponding to Tokyo and Seoul's morning sessions, London's open, and New York's morning session. The volume of trades at 14:00 UTC is about 61 million per hour, compared to around 20 million per hour at 21:00 UTC.

The author notes that this pattern has practical consequences for traders, including the fact that a stop-loss order may not be equally safe at every hour. A breakout at 20:00 UTC may be less significant than one at 14:00 UTC, as it occurs during thinner liquidity.