Short answer: ICT kill zones are four short windows in the forex day when institutional order flow is heaviest and price makes its cleanest directional moves. On a New York clock, the Asian window runs 8 pm to 10 pm and the London open runs 2 am to 5 am. The New York open runs 7 am to 10 am, and the London close runs 10 am to noon. Traders who follow ICT concepts take their entries inside these windows and mostly stay flat outside them.
This page is for traders who can read a candlestick chart and want a plain explanation. You will get the clock times, the price behaviour in each window, the trading pairs that suit each one, and how the idea fits a prop-firm evaluation.
What a kill zone actually filters
A kill zone is a time filter. It tells you when the market is likely to be worth watching, and nothing more. The term comes from the ICT (Inner Circle Trader) body of work, one of the most repeated ideas in forex trading. The argument is that the largest participants concentrate their activity around the opens and closes of the main financial centres. Orders cluster there. Stops get run there. Trends start and end there.
That matters because a 24-hour market is mostly unremarkable. Roughly two thirds of the forex day is drift: thin volume, sluggish candles, and spreads that quietly eat into small targets. A trader who watches every hour gets tired, gets jittery, and ends up taking ordinary setups in dead hours out of boredom. The kill zone idea is blunt. Pick the three hours when the big money is punctual, be at the screen then, and be somewhere else the rest of the time.
The four ICT kill zones on a New York clock
ICT times everything from New York, because that is where the reference charts were built and where the daily candle is treated as opening at midnight.
| Kill zone | New York time | Typical GMT in winter | What is going on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asian | 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm | 01:00 to 03:00 | Tokyo desks price the day, a range forms |
| London open | 2:00 am to 5:00 am | 07:00 to 10:00 | European banks arrive, the Asian range gets tested |
| New York open | 7:00 am to 10:00 am | 12:00 to 15:00 | US data lands, the London move continues or reverses |
| London close | 10:00 am to 12:00 pm | 15:00 to 17:00 | European desks square up, retracements are common |
Some traders stretch the Asian window to midnight and start the New York window at 8:30 am to catch the first data release. The exact minute is less consequential than being consistent, so pick one definition and keep it for a month.
Two calendar traps deserve a mention. First, London and New York switch to summer time on different dates. For a few weeks each spring and autumn the gap between them shrinks from five hours to four. During those weeks the London open window lands an hour earlier on the GMT column above. Second, the New York window on stock indices is tied to the cash equity open, and that open does not happen on US holidays. The NYSE trading hours and holiday calendar lists the regular session times and the closure dates.
How price behaves inside each window
Each kill zone has its own temperament. Treat these as tendencies, seen often enough to plan around, never as certainties.
Asian kill zone: the range gets built
Without European or American banks present, the market rarely travels far. Price mostly oscillates between two levels that later become the reference points for the whole day. On EUR/USD that range is often 20 to 40 pips. The useful work here is marking levels: note the high, the low, and the midpoint. A trader who tries to scalp breakouts of a 25-pip box is fighting a stingy market with a wide spread. That trader will squander the day's risk budget before London wakes up.
London open kill zone: the false move, then the real one
This is the window most ICT traders build their whole routine around. A common pattern is a sharp push through one side of the Asian range that stalls within minutes. What follows is a stubbornly persistent move in the other direction that can last for hours. The first push is the trap, often called the Judas swing, and it collects the stops sitting just beyond the Asian high or low. High volatility is normal here, and it is the reason both the reward and the risk are larger than in any other window.
New York open kill zone: continuation or reversal
By 7 am New York, London has been trading for five hours and has usually shown its hand. Now American desks, and the economic news releases that land at 8:30 am, decide whether that London move keeps going or gets violently unwound. Two shapes dominate. In the first, price pulls back for an hour into an imbalance left by the London leg and then continues. In the second, a data release hits, the London extreme gets swept, and the day reverses. Either way, the levels you need were set earlier, so you arrive with a plan rather than an opinion.
London close kill zone: squaring up
Between 10 am and noon New York, European traders close positions before their day ends. The market decelerates. Trends from the morning frequently retrace a third to a half of their range, then go sideways. It is the most underused of the four windows, mostly because it is awkward. The move is often lumpy rather than tidy, and it seldom turns into a fresh trend.
Matching trading pairs to each kill zone
A pair whose home currency is asleep will scarcely move, and the spread cost is larger relative to any target. The table below is a starting point rather than a rule.
| Kill zone | Pairs that tend to move | Pairs to leave alone |
|---|---|---|
| Asian | USD/JPY, AUD/USD, NZD/USD, AUD/JPY | GBP/USD, EUR/GBP |
| London open | EUR/USD, GBP/USD, EUR/GBP, GBP/JPY | AUD/NZD, USD/CAD |
| New York open | EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/CAD, gold, US indices | AUD/JPY, NZD/USD |
| London close | EUR/USD, GBP/USD | Anything with thin afternoon volume |
Gold and the US indices behave like New York instruments. Their busiest stretch begins with the US data at 8:30 am and the cash open at 9:30 am. For them the New York window is the only one that really counts. Bitcoin and the other large cryptocoins trade around the clock, and the kill zone pattern is patchy there.
If you are choosing between windows rather than between pairs, our guide to the best time to trade forex walks through the session clock in a broader way.
A trading strategy checklist for each kill zone
Most ICT traders pair the windows with a small set of trading strategies built on liquidity, displacement and imbalance. The specific entry model is covered in our guide to the ICT trading strategy.
Before the window opens:
- Mark the previous day's high and low, the Asian range, and any obvious round number.
- Check the calendar for economic news releases inside the window and decide now whether you sit out the first five minutes after each one.
- Write down your daily loss cap and the maximum number of attempts, usually one or two.
During the window:
- Wait for price to take out one of the marked levels. No sweep, no interest.
- Require a displacement candle, a fast move that breaks the most recent opposing swing.
- Enter on the retrace into the fair value gap that displacement left behind. Your stop sits a few pips past the wick that took the liquidity.
- Aim for the far edge of the range, or the next pool of resting orders, and scale out on the way.
After the window closes:
- Flatten anything that has not reached its first target, unless your plan explicitly allows a hold.
- Log the window, the pair, the level swept, and the outcome.
For a stricter, one-hour version of this sequence, see our guide to the ICT silver bullet strategy. The checklist above is the forgiving version; the silver bullet is the unforgiving one.
Worked example: one London kill zone trade on a 10,000 account
Suppose a trader runs a 10,000 account and risks 0.5 percent per trade, which is 50. Overnight, EUR/USD built an Asian range 30 pips tall. At 2:40 am New York time price pushes 12 pips above the Asian high and stalls. Within twenty minutes it prints a large bearish candle that closes back inside the range.
The trader waits for the retrace into the gap the candle left, and enters short 8 pips below the Asian high. The stop goes 4 pips above the sweep high, so the stop distance is 24 pips. Risk of 50 divided by 24 pips is about 2.08 per pip, which rounds down to 0.20 lots. The first target is the Asian low, 38 pips away. The second is the previous day's low, 60 pips away.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Account | 10,000 |
| Risk per trade | 50 (0.5 percent) |
| Stop distance | 24 pips |
| Position size | 0.20 lots |
| Target 1 | 38 pips, about 1.6R |
| Target 2 | 60 pips, 2.5R |
| Round-trip spread cost at 1 pip | about 2, or 4 percent of risk |
If price reaches target 1 and the trader closes half, then trails the rest to target 2, the trade earns roughly 100. If the sweep high is taken out again, the loss is 50 plus the spread. That lopsided ratio, a full loss against a gain of two units, is the entire attractiveness of the approach.
Now move the same trade to the Asian window, where the spread might be 2 pips instead of 1, so cost doubles to 8 percent of risk. A 24-pip stop is also nearly the whole Asian range, so the setup scarcely exists. Same trader, same rules, and the clock alone turns a tidy plan into a clumsy one.
Limitations and common mistakes with kill zone trading
Some honest caveats follow.
They are conventions. Nothing physical happens at 2:00 am New York. The window works because enough participants show up then, and participation drifts. A public holiday in London leaves the London open window threadbare, and the usual pattern simply does not appear.
News inside the window changes everything. Economic news releases at 8:30 am can make the New York window disorderly for the first fifteen minutes. Deciding in advance whether you trade through data is worth more than any entry refinement.
The time horizon has to match. Kill zones are an intraday tool. A swing trader holding for three days gains little from timing an entry to the minute. That trader can needlessly stress over a window that is irrelevant to a 200-pip target.
Ambiguity is built in. Whether a move counts as a sweep or a displacement is a judgement call, and two traders watching the same window will often disagree. That ambiguity is a source of hesitancy for beginners, who then enter late and stop out on the retrace.
Common mistakes I see repeatedly. Trading all four windows every day, which turns a filter into a full-time job. Forcing a trade in the final ten minutes because the window is closing. And treating a month of good results as proof, when results vary and a month is a small sample.
Kill zones inside a prop-firm evaluation
The reason this idea suits an evaluation account is structural. A rule set with a daily loss limit and a total drawdown cap punishes overtrading more than anything else. One or two windows, one or two attempts, and the platform is closed by mid-morning.
Run the arithmetic on a hypothetical account. If the daily loss limit is 4 percent and you risk 0.5 percent per attempt, you can lose eight times in a day before hitting it. A two-attempt cap inside one window keeps you at a fraction of the limit and leaves the rest of the week intact. If the total drawdown is a static 6 percent, twelve consecutive half-percent losses is what it takes to fail. That is a precarious streak only a disorderly trader produces.
Pivex lists its loss limits openly before you begin, with no time limit and no minimum trading days. Scalping is allowed with no minimum hold time, and news trading is allowed. The daily loss limit on a Pivex account resets each day, which is the same rhythm a one-window routine already runs on. The one-time fee is refundable on the path from evaluation to payout. The real cost of a failed attempt is therefore the weeks of discipline it took to get there. That is a good reason to halve your size while a kill zone routine is still new.
Next step: pick one window, one pair, and one entry model, then record twenty sessions without changing anything. When the log shows the sweep-and-displacement sequence often enough to be worth your mornings, size the routine against a published daily loss limit rather than a guess. Pivex lays out its limits and its 80 percent reward split up front, so that sizing decision can be made on paper before the first attempt.
Related guides: the ICT trading strategy and the best time to trade forex.
Before participating, review Pivex's current program rules and decide whether a simulated proprietary trading evaluation fits your experience and risk limits. Participation does not guarantee a reward, income, or any particular trading result.