Know your market's personality.
The same strategy behaves differently on the DAX at 08:05 and on Silver at 20:00. Session windows, typical ranges, what drives each instrument, and which of this site's strategies and wave tendencies fit — for the eight focus markets: US, UK, German and Japanese indices, US Oil, Gold and Silver.
The session map ↑ top
Everything intraday starts with knowing which session you're in. Cash-session hours below in UTC (northern-winter time; shift −1h during US/EU summer). CFDs quote nearly 24/5 via futures, but character follows the cash sessions.
Instrument playbooks ↑ top
🇺🇸 US500 & US100 (S&P 500 / Nasdaq 100)
- Drivers: mega-cap tech (US100 especially), Fed policy and yields, US data at 13:30 UTC (CPI, NFP), earnings seasons. The deepest, most liquid index products in the world — spreads are tight, structures are "textbook".
- Session rhythm: pre-market drift on EU flow → high-energy first 90 minutes after the 14:30 UTC cash open → lunch chop (~17:00–18:30) → afternoon trend or reversal, with the last hour often revisiting the day's extreme.
- Character: US500 mean-reverts more (index breadth dampens moves); US100 trends harder and overshoots — the same setup needs wider stops but pays bigger runners on US100.
- Wave/pattern notes: cleanest wave-3 extensions anywhere; opening expanded-flats trap breakout traders almost daily; late-day ending diagonals into 21:00 are common reversal setups.
- Best fits from this site: ORB at the cash open, C4 trend-machine on trend days, C2 VWAP fade through lunch.
🇬🇧 UK100 (FTSE 100)
- Drivers: heavyweight miners, energy and banks — so it often tracks commodity prices and global risk more than the UK economy; GBP strength inversely affects it (exporter earnings), a relationship unique among the focus indices.
- Session rhythm: 08:00 UTC open with a modest impulse, mid-morning fade, then increasingly driven by US futures from 12:00; often finishes wherever the US drags it.
- Character: the slowest, most overlap-heavy of the group — a ranger, not a runner. Clean 5-wave impulses are rare intraday; W-X-Y grinds are the norm.
- Wave/pattern notes: count on 15m+ only; double tops/bottoms at round numbers (7,900 / 8,000) respect beautifully; triangles resolve late and often with the US open, not the London one.
- Best fits: range mean-reversion, C8 pivot-fade system, envelope fades — trend playbooks underperform here.
🇩🇪 GER40 (DAX 40)
- Drivers: exporters (autos, industrials, SAP), ECB policy, China demand sentiment, EUR moves. Big-figure round numbers (18,000 / 18,500) act like magnets.
- Session rhythm: the famous 08:00–10:00 UTC window — the DAX does a disproportionate share of its daily range in the first two hours, frequently setting the day's high or low there. Quiet mid-day, then a second personality from 14:30 as US flow arrives (and regularly reverses the morning move).
- Character: fast, impulsive, stop-hunting; loves a false break of the opening range before the real move. More aggressive than UK100 by a wide margin.
- Wave/pattern notes: textbook morning impulses (count them live — the 5-wave morning leg into ~10:00 exhaustion is a repeating template), ending diagonals into the US open, deep 61.8% wave-2s that terrify longs before trend days.
- Best fits: ORB on the 08:00 open (use the conservative retest — the DAX fakes), C1 EMA+RSI pullback in the morning trend, C3 qualified breakout.
🇯🇵 JP225 (Nikkei 225)
- Drivers: USD/JPY above all (exporter index — yen weakness = Nikkei strength), Bank of Japan policy, US tech leadership overnight. Watching USD/JPY alongside JP225 is not optional.
- Session rhythm: Tokyo cash 00:00–06:00 UTC with a lunch break (02:30–03:30) that visibly dents volatility; then the index trades as a derivative of US futures for the rest of the day. Big gaps between Tokyo close and next open are structural, not noise.
- Character: gap-and-trend behaviour; trends persist across days more than intraday. BOJ intervention headlines cause instant multi-percent moves — keep size honest.
- Wave/pattern notes: waves complete across sessions (a wave 3's middle is often literally an overnight gap); intraday counts inside one Tokyo session are frequently just one sub-wave. Rectangles and flags dominate the Tokyo afternoon.
- Best fits: volume breakout at the Tokyo open, gap-fill fades using C9's acceptance/rejection framework against the prior close, trend continuation in the EU morning when USD/JPY runs.
🛢️ WTI Crude (USOIL)
- Drivers: EIA inventories (Wednesday 14:30 UTC — the week's scheduled volatility event), OPEC+ decisions, geopolitical headlines, dollar strength. API numbers Tuesday evening pre-shock the Wednesday move.
- Session rhythm: quiet Asia, warming Europe, then the real market from 14:00 UTC (NY energy hours) with the 14:30–16:00 window doing most of the damage. Settlement around 19:30 UTC often produces a final push.
- Character: the trendiest instrument in this list — when it goes, it goes for hours without meaningful pullbacks. Also the most headline-vulnerable: a single tweet-sized geopolitical item can gap it 1%.
- Wave/pattern notes: channels exceptionally well (draw the wave 2–4 line and trust it); news regularly truncates wave 5s — treat counts as void across EIA releases; flags mid-trend are the highest-quality continuation entries.
- Best fits: C4 trend machine (Supertrend keeps you in oil trends longer than instinct will), momentum scalping post-EIA once direction resolves, flags via pullback strategy. Avoid mean-reversion fades on trend days entirely.
🥇 Gold (XAUUSD)
- Drivers: real yields (inverse), dollar index, central-bank buying, risk-off flows. US data at 13:30 UTC moves gold as violently as it moves indices.
- Session rhythm: respectable Asia liquidity (unique among the group), London fixing flows at 10:30 and 15:00 UTC, main energy in COMEX hours 13:30–18:00. Late-US drift is thin and whippy.
- Character: trends in long clean channels punctuated by brutal 30–60 minute counter-moves; respects fibs and round numbers ($2,350, $2,400) with unusual precision — which is why harmonic traders love it.
- Wave/pattern notes: the classic wave-5 extender — fifth waves run 1.618×W1 or more while every oscillator screams overbought. Demand divergence + channel/diagonal completion before fading. Bat and Gartley completions at fib clusters are reliably respected.
- Best fits: C5 and C6 harmonic stacks (gold is their natural habitat), C1 pullback in COMEX-hours trends, C7 Ichimoku+MACD on 15m for the bigger legs.
🥈 Silver (XAGUSD)
- Drivers: everything gold reacts to, plus an industrial-demand component — so it can decouple from gold on growth news. The gold/silver ratio is the pairs-trading tell: silver outperforming = risk-on metals move.
- Session rhythm: mirrors gold's clock with a fraction of the liquidity — the same session map, wider spreads, nastier slippage around 13:30 data.
- Character: gold's moves amplified ~2× with worse fills. B-wave fake-outs and expanded flats are constant; "obvious" levels get run by design before the real move.
- Wave/pattern notes: use gold's wave count as the map and silver as the execution vehicle only when they agree; silver-only counts degrade fast. Wedge/diagonal completions overshoot their lines — enter on the reclaim, not the touch.
- Best fits: failed-break range entries (the market is one big stop-hunt), harmonic completions with the PRZ widened by ~0.5×ATR, halved position size versus gold as standard practice. Spread-check before every scalp: silver CFD spreads can be 3–5× gold's in quiet hours.
Cross-market cheat sheet ↑ top
| Market | Cash hours (UTC, winter) | Key scheduled events | Personality in one line | First-choice playbooks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US500 | 14:30–21:00 | US CPI/NFP 13:30 · FOMC 19:00 | Deep, mean-reverting, textbook structures | ORB · C2 · C4 |
| US100 | 14:30–21:00 | Same + mega-cap earnings | US500 with the trend dial turned up | ORB · C1 · C4 |
| UK100 | 08:00–16:30 | BoE 12:00 · UK CPI 07:00 | Slow ranger, commodity-flavoured | Range · C8 |
| GER40 | 08:00–16:30 | ECB 13:15 · ZEW/Ifo 09:00–10:00 | Explosive mornings, fake breaks, stop-hunts | ORB(retest) · C1 · C3 |
| JP225 | 00:00–06:00 (lunch 02:30–03:30) | BoJ (no fixed time!) · USD/JPY flows | Gap-and-trend, yen-driven | Breakout · C9 |
| WTI | most active 14:00–20:30 | EIA Wed 14:30 · OPEC+ meetings | Trendiest; headline-fragile | C4 · flags · post-EIA scalps |
| Gold | most active 13:30–18:00 | US data 13:30 · London fixes 10:30/15:00 | Precise, fib-respecting, W5-extender | C5 · C6 · C1 |
| Silver | as gold, thinner | Same as gold | Gold ×2 volatility, ÷2 liquidity | Failed-break · C5 (wide PRZ) |
Resources ↑ top
- Investing.com — major world indicesLive quotes and session status for every focus index in one view.
- Yahoo Finance — DAX · Nikkei 225 · S&P 500Free historical daily data for the ATR/ratio studies described in the Elliott data-science section.
- EIA — Weekly Petroleum Status ReportThe Wednesday 14:30 UTC release that defines WTI's week; check the schedule around US holidays.
- TradingView — markets overviewCross-asset dashboard; build a watchlist of the eight focus instruments plus USD/JPY and the gold/silver ratio (GOLD/SILVER).
- Economic calendar habitWhatever calendar you use (TradingView's built-in works), filter to US · UK · EU · JP high-impact only, and mark 13:30 UTC in your chart timezone permanently — half the "random" 5m spikes in every focus market are that timestamp.