Does the NQ market open trend strategy actually work?

Yes, and it is the best hour on our book. On 3,505 real NQ trades since 2011, the 9 ET open hour made 59.2% of all book profit ($663,471 of $1,120,402). It did that at the lowest win rate of any hour, 38.6%. The open hour makes the most money by winning less than 4 times in 10 and letting the winners run.

That is the whole finding. The most profitable hour to trade the Nasdaq open is also the hardest hour to hold through.

The open hour towers over every other hour

Group all 3,505 book trades by the hour they entered. One hour dwarfs the rest.

Entry hour (ET) Trades Net profit Share of book Win rate
9 (open) 1,592 $663,471 59.2% 38.6%
18 (overnight) 799 $191,887 17.1% 56.3%
10 514 $91,436 8.2% 44.9%
11 232 $64,693 5.8% 48.7%
14 114 $56,503 5.0% 52.6%
15 50 $22,812 2.0% 58.0%
13 98 $16,836 1.5% 46.9%
12 106 $12,766 1.1% 50.0%

The 9 ET hour holds 1,592 trades and 59.2% of the profit. Add the overnight 18 ET bucket and the top two hours carry 76.3% of the book. Every row sums back to the full book, $1,120,402.30.

Bar chart of share of book profit by ET entry hour across 3,505 NQ trades. The 9 ET open bar towers at 59.2 percent ($663k) in blue. The 18 ET overnight reopen is second at 17.1 percent ($192k) in green. Hours 10, 11 and 14 ET are grey at 8.2, 5.8 and 5.0 percent, and 15, 13 and 12 ET trail at 2.0, 1.5 and 1.1 percent. Bar chart of share of book profit by ET entry hour across 3,505 NQ trades. The 9 ET open bar towers at 59.2 percent ($663k) in blue. The 18 ET overnight reopen is second at 17.1 percent ($192k) in green. Hours 10, 11 and 14 ET are grey at 8.2, 5.8 and 5.0 percent, and 15, 13 and 12 ET trail at 2.0, 1.5 and 1.1 percent.
The 9 ET open hour makes 59.2% of the book's $1,120,402 profit, more than three times the next hour. Every bar sums back to the full book. Grouped by ET entry hour on our v8 export.

Now look at the win rate column. The open hour is not just the biggest. It is the worst at winning. Its 38.6% win rate is the lowest of any hour. The next lowest, 10 ET, sits at 44.9%. Every other hour wins more often and makes less money.

One caveat on that 38.6%. It is a blended rate across the subs that fire in the hour, not the win rate of a single strategy. Segregated, the trend sub wins 33.9% in the open hour, the short sub 40.5%, and the long opening-range breakout 47.7%. So the low blended rate is driven by the high-count trend sub, not by "the open" as an abstract property. The trend workhorse is the true low-win-rate, high-payoff engine, and it dominates the hour by trade count, which pulls the blend down to 38.6%.

That is the trend-following signature. Losses are cut short and winners are allowed to run. At the open the average winner is $2,777 and the average loser is $1,065, a payoff of 2.61 to 1. So a hitter that misses six of ten still wins the game on size. By contrast the 18 ET overnight hour wins 56.3% but pays only 1.21 to 1.

Combo chart of profit share (blue bars) versus win rate (amber line) by ET entry hour. The 9 ET open has the tallest profit bar at 59.2 percent yet the lowest win rate at 38.6 percent. Win rate climbs across the day to 58.0 percent at 15 ET and 56.3 percent at 18 ET, while profit shares stay small. Combo chart of profit share (blue bars) versus win rate (amber line) by ET entry hour. The 9 ET open has the tallest profit bar at 59.2 percent yet the lowest win rate at 38.6 percent. Win rate climbs across the day to 58.0 percent at 15 ET and 56.3 percent at 18 ET, while profit shares stay small.
The 9 ET open makes the most money at the lowest win rate, 38.6%. Win rate rises through the day as profit falls. The most profitable hour is the hardest to hold through.

The entries land right after the 9:30 cash open

The "9 ET hour" is not vague. The entries cluster at 9:40, 9:45, 9:50, and 9:55, right after the 9:30 New York cash open. That 9:30 ET bell is the regular-session open for the Nasdaq-100 cash index, the same moment CME sets the reference for NQ futures, and it is the daily liquidity and volatility event these entries key off. We confirmed the minutes with a timezone check on the export. The 18:xx bucket is our overnight strategy, a separate animal.

So when we say "the open," we mean the first 25 minutes of the U.S. equity session, after the opening range has formed.

Whose trades are these

This is one live NQ book, not a textbook. It is a 6 strategy family sharing a single position, backtested on TradingView from 2011 to 2026 at 1 to 3 volatility-scaled contracts. In this v8 export 5 of the 6 subs actually place trades. The short opening-range breakout (S-ORB) fires zero trades in the live book. It is contended out at the shared position, so the working lineup is 5 active subs: intraday trend, long opening-range breakout, short, overnight trend, and universal.

Every strategy is a momentum or trend-continuation entry. Intraday trend, opening-range breakout, and one overnight sub. None of them are mean reversion. None are scalps.

That matters for how you read this. "The open hour is the low-win-rate workhorse" is a property of momentum entries on NQ. A mean-reversion book would show a different hour geometry. Do not treat our hour map as a universal law of markets. It is what our real trades did.

The long opening-range breakout is the workhorse

One strategy does most of the open-hour work by trade count: the long opening-range breakout, which we call L-ORB. On its own, tracked standalone, here is its full tear sheet.

Metric L-ORB standalone
Trades 1,653
Net profit $284,206
Win rate 49.8%
Profit factor (gross wins / gross losses) 1.32
Per-trade t-stat 2.92
Max drawdown $33,765 (11.6% of its normalized capital base)
Max consecutive losses 14
Rolling 4-year profit factor 1.01 to 1.51
Positive years 12 of 16

L-ORB is itself open-heavy. 43.6% of its net comes from the 9 ET hour and another 24.1% from 10 ET. Buy the breakout of the opening range, hold the runners, and the morning pays the bill.

The $33,765 max drawdown is exact. The 11.6% figure is that dollar drawdown against L-ORB's normalized capital base, not against peak equity. On its own equity curve the same drawdown is 17.7% of peak and 11.9% of final equity. We flag the denominator so the percentage is not read as a peak-to-trough equity drop.

But L-ORB is not who owns the open-hour dollars

Here is the twist. L-ORB has the most trades, but it does not own the open hour's profit.

Split the 9 ET hour's $663,471 by strategy. The trend sub (S1) owns 49.1% of it. The short sub (S3) owns 34.0%. L-ORB owns only 14.4% of the hour's dollars.

Horizontal bar chart splitting the 9 ET open hour's $663,471 net profit by strategy. S1 Trend owns 49.1 percent ($326k) from 944 trades in green. S3 Short owns 34.0 percent ($225k) from just 185 trades in red. S2 L-ORB owns only 14.4 percent ($96k) despite 444 trades in blue. S6 Universal owns 2.5 percent ($17k) in amber. Horizontal bar chart splitting the 9 ET open hour's $663,471 net profit by strategy. S1 Trend owns 49.1 percent ($326k) from 944 trades in green. S3 Short owns 34.0 percent ($225k) from just 185 trades in red. S2 L-ORB owns only 14.4 percent ($96k) despite 444 trades in blue. S6 Universal owns 2.5 percent ($17k) in amber.
Trend and Short own 83% of the open hour's dollars. L-ORB fires the second-most trades in the hour (444) but carries only 14.4% of the money. Trade count and profit are not the same thing.

L-ORB is big by count. It is not the biggest by open-hour profit. The trend and short entries land fewer trades in that hour but carry bigger runners. If you want the money at the open, you need trend continuation and you need to be willing to go short, not just buy the range break.

How the edge holds up

We resampled the open-hour profit stream to see if 59.2% is a fluke of one lucky path.

Using a moving-block bootstrap (5,000 resamples, block length 20, so losing streaks stay intact), 100% of the resampled open-hour paths came out net positive. Even the 2.5th-percentile path, the unlucky tail, still kept $441,131 of open-hour profit.

Bootstrap confidence band for the 9 ET open-hour profit. The historical point estimate marker sits at $663,471. The green band spans the 2.5th percentile at $441,131 to the 97.5th percentile at $908k. A caption states 100 percent of 5,000 resampled open-hour paths came out net positive. Bootstrap confidence band for the 9 ET open-hour profit. The historical point estimate marker sits at $663,471. The green band spans the 2.5th percentile at $441,131 to the 97.5th percentile at $908k. A caption states 100 percent of 5,000 resampled open-hour paths came out net positive.
Every one of 5,000 resampled open-hour paths stayed net positive. Even the 2.5th-percentile unlucky path keeps $441,131. The band is a robustness check; the headline stays the historical $663,471.

The headline number stays the historical point estimate, $663,471. The bootstrap is only a robustness band, not a forecast. We never publish the resample mean.

Read the "100% positive" honestly. This is an in-sample moving-block resample of one historical path, so it measures how fragile the result is to the ordering and clustering of the trades we already have. It is not an out-of-sample test and it is not evidence of forward edge. For a stream with a 2.61 payoff and a large positive mean, a high positive share is close to expected, so treat it as a fragility check only. The out-of-sample question, whether the low win rate and the payoff hold on months outside our regime map, is the one we flag as open below.

Methodology

Every number here traces to a script in our work folder (compute_stats.mjs, mc_hour_edge.mjs, tz_check.mjs, tearsheet.mjs) run on the named exports. Each headline number was recomputed two independent ways and matched.

The honest limits

A 38.6% win rate is brutal to hold through. Six or seven losers in a row are normal here. L-ORB's worst streak was 14 straight losses. Most discretionary traders quit the exact hour that pays them.

The per-hour cells past the open get thin. The noon hour (12 ET) has 106 trades, the 3 PM ET hour (15 ET) only 50. Do not lean on any single small hour. Only the 9 ET and 18 ET buckets are large enough to trust hard.

Our regime map only runs through May 2025, so 235 recent trades sit outside it. The regime read is a robustness check, not a headline.

Try it on your own tape

You do not need our data to see this. Take your own NQ trade log and do one thing. Add a column for the entry hour in ET, then sum profit and win rate per hour.

per-hour = group your fills by ET entry hour
for each hour: sum(net_pnl), count(trades), wins/trades
sort hours by total profit, descending

If your book is momentum-based, the open hour will likely sit at the top for profit and near the bottom for win rate. If it does, the question is not whether to trade the open. It is whether you can sit through the win rate that pays you.

What we test next

We want to know two things. First, whether a discretionary trader can capture the open-hour edge without sitting through the full 38.6%-win-rate tape, maybe by only taking the trend and short entries that own the hour. Second, whether that low win rate stays stable across the newest months that fall outside our regime map. If the open hour ever starts winning more than 45% of the time, something has changed, and we will say so.

See how the hours fit together in our best time to trade NQ futures breakdown, why the low win rate needs room in how many points an NQ stop-loss should be, the full lineup on our strategies, and access details on pricing.

Conflict disclosure: We trade this NQ book live and we sell access to the signals. Judge the data on its merits and reproduce it yourself.

CFTC Rule 4.41: Hypothetical or simulated performance results have certain limitations. Unlike an actual performance record, simulated results do not represent actual trading. Also, because the trades have not actually been executed, the results may have under- or over-compensated for the impact, if any, of certain market factors, such as lack of liquidity. Simulated trading programs in general are also subject to the fact that they are designed with the benefit of hindsight. No representation is being made that any account will or is likely to achieve profit or losses similar to those shown.

Past performance is not indicative of future results.