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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.nexttick.app/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

The hour-of-day heatmap breaks your P&L down by the hour your trades were entered. Each cell in the grid represents one hour of the trading day, colored from deep red (consistent losses) to deep green (consistent profits). At a glance, you can see whether you make your money at the open, give it back at lunch, or grind it out into the close.

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How the heatmap works

NextTick reads the entry time and trade date from every trade in your log and aggregates P&L by hour across your full history. The result is a grid where the X-axis is the calendar week and the Y-axis is the hour of day. The color of each cell reflects net P&L for trades entered in that hour during that week.
  • Green cells: You were net profitable during this hour
  • Red cells: You were net negative during this hour
  • Gray cells: No trades were logged during this hour
Hovering over any cell shows the raw P&L figure, number of trades, and win rate for that specific hour-and-week combination.

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Finding your dead hours

Most traders have one or two hours where they consistently lose. These “dead hours” are often invisible until you see them on a heatmap because the losses are spread across many individual trades and many different weeks. On a single-day P&L view, a bad 11 AM trade just looks like a bad trade. On the heatmap, a consistently red 11 AM column is a pattern. If a particular hour shows red across three or more consecutive weeks, treat it as a signal worth acting on:
  1. Stop trading during that window for two weeks and track the difference in your daily P&L.
  2. Review the individual trades from that hour to see if they share a setup_tag — the problem may be setup-specific, not hour-specific.
  3. Compare the hour to market structure. Pre-market, the first 30 minutes of the open, the lunch lull (roughly 11:30–1:00 ET), and the final 30 minutes of the close each have distinct characteristics that favor different styles.

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Getting more from the heatmap

  • Overlay with setup tags — if you filter the heatmap to a single setup tag, you can see whether a strategy only works at certain times. An ORB setup that looks mediocre overall may be profitable exclusively in the first hour and a drag every other time you take it.
  • Compare to your emotional tags — if your worst hours also carry emotional tags like revenge or overtrading, the hour isn’t the root cause; the behavior is.
  • Use it alongside Goals — once you identify your worst hour, add a rule in Goals to stop trading after a certain loss threshold during that window.
The heatmap becomes statistically meaningful after approximately 50 logged trades. With fewer trades, individual outliers will dominate individual cells and the color pattern will be misleading.