Time-of-Day Trading Patterns:
Do Intraday Moves Really Repeat?
How to Test Time-of-Day Patterns in TradingView
I’ve always been curious about time-of-day patterns… simple little rhythms that repeat day after day.
Nothing fancy.
But I’ve seen these plays appear, disappear, then reappear again over the years.
I even had a custom TradingView tool built to help me test them. (It’s here if you want a free copy.)
And the thesis is simple…
Algos kick in at specific times of day → price moves → that pattern often repeats for several days straight.
Spot it early… and you’ve suddenly added a bit of extra weight to your intraday ideas.
TIME OF DAY
Anyway, I’m a simple trader: I spot patterns, do enough research to convince myself there’s an edge… and then erm… just trade them.
There are far smarter people than me doing the deep work… some inside hedge funds, others publishing the research.
And I came across a recently published whitepaper:
The Intra-Day Stock Return Periodicity Puzzle
With complex equations like this in it….
So I did what any normal person does when faced with pages of maths…
I threw it into ChatGPT.
Now I encourage you to download it for yourself, and upload it to ChatGPT because there’s a lot to unpack. VWAP info, closing price patterns, plays at the open.
But here’s the best bit…
“1. The same 30-minute window tomorrow behaves like the same 30-minute window today
The researchers ran cross-sectional regressions like this:
- Look at every stock’s return in a specific 30-min interval today.
- Compare it with the same interval over the past 5 trading days.
- Average the results.
What they found:
If a stock has a strong return in a specific interval today (e.g., 9:30–10:00), it tends to have a strong return in that same interval tomorrow.
And not just tomorrow—this pattern is detectable up to 40 trading days.
It’s NOT intraday momentum.
It’s intraday periodicity—it’s tied to the clock.”
In other words.
Yes, time-of-day moves do repeat.
Which seems like the simplest strategy out there, but as I mentioned in a time-based trading post 2 years ago, the edge for us is to layer these time-of-day tendencies into our existing playbook.
For example, see a reversal setup, and it’s during a statistically strong period… you’ve potentially got more edge.
Ok, so to summarise:
- Time of day moves do repeat themselves
- Download the whitepaper here
- Download my simple TradingView tool for testing these here
Have fun exploring!