concept

Killzones

The time windows where institutional activity concentrates. On the ET clock: Asia, London, Pre-NY, NY open, Silver Bullet, and PM.

updated 2026-04-23

ict-coretime-of-daysessions

Why time of day matters

Not all minutes are equal. Institutional participation concentrates in specific windows, and those windows behave differently. A breakout at 10:30 ET is not the same event as a breakout at 13:30 ET. Our backtests show this repeatedly — the same trigger at different times has different expected outcomes.

“Killzones” is the ICT term for these windows. The name is dramatic; the idea is practical.

The NQ / ET killzones we use

Window	ET time	What’s happening
Asia	20:00 – 00:00	Range builds. Low volume, thin liquidity. Sets levels for later.
Pre-London IB	00:00 – 02:00	2-hour initial balance that London will break.
London	02:00 – 05:00	First real liquidity hit of the day. Sweeps Asia range.
Pre-NY	07:00 – 09:30	Gap alignment, pre-market positioning.
NY Open	09:30 – 11:00	RTH starts. Opening range forms 9:30–10:00.
Silver Bullet	10:00 – 11:00	A specific 60-minute window with outsized close-direction predictive power.
Lunch	11:30 – 13:30	Choppier, thinner. Most signals time-decay here.
PM Session	13:30 – 15:50	Second wind. Often continuation of the morning direction.
RTH Close Hour	16:00 – 17:00	Range that seeds overnight mid-fade setups (R1617 FADE).

Where our models live

Each model on the site is tied to a specific killzone. A selection:

Asia window: R1617 FADE fires here against 16:17 range mid.
Pre-London IB: PRELON IB — 88–91% touch rate depending on classification.
London: LON MOMENTUM BULL, LON BOTH BULL.
NY Open: HCS REVERSAL at the 9:30 snapshot.
Silver Bullet: SB CONTINUATION — the single largest close-direction edge in the NQ stack.
Spanning RTH: AMD with a 120-min TTL from open.

The same signal can behave differently across killzones

The HCS Reversal model is a concrete example: the same 4-filter score gives a mean-reversion signal at 9:30 but a continuation signal at 10:30. Score +4 at 9:30 fades; score +3 at 10:30 continues. Two different markets within one hour.

This is why every model on the site names its active window. A Tier-1 signal outside its window is just noise.

Practical rules of thumb

If a trigger fires before its killzone, it’s not a valid signal. Wait.
If a trigger fires after its killzone’s TTL, the edge has decayed. Skip or discount heavily.
When two killzones overlap (e.g., NY Open + Silver Bullet from 10:00–11:00), the confluence is meaningful — models aligning across overlapping windows print harder.