What is Kill zone?
A kill zone is a time window in the trading day, often tied to a market session open, in which setups are preferred because volatility tends to be higher.
What does Kill zone mean in practice?
ICT teaching names windows around the London and New York opens and the Asian session. Within them, price is said to be more likely to make decisive moves, so a setup that appears during a kill zone is preferred over the same setup at a quiet hour.
Whether the windows add anything is an empirical question, and a testable one: take the same rule, run it with and without the time filter, and compare. Time is among the easiest filters to test because it is unambiguous.
A worked example
Illustrative only: run one entry rule twice, once at any hour and once only between 07:00 and 10:00 UTC. The comparison shows whether the window helped, hurt or did nothing.
How to read or test it
Test time as a plain filter: run a fixed entry rule across all hours, then only inside your chosen windows, on the same history. Compare trade count, expectancy and drawdown for the two runs. Remember that session times shift with daylight saving in some markets, so decide on UTC or local time and keep it consistent. If the filtered version is not clearly better, the window is not adding anything.
How AKQX handles Kill zone
A kill zone is a time filter, which is one of the easiest ideas to write as an explicit rule and test with and without. AKQX's True Day Open filter is a related time-based rule. Check the Strategy Builder in the app for the time-window options currently available.
See ICT and SMC algo builder for the feature page.
A common mistake
Choosing a window after looking at when the winners happened, which just fits the filter to the past.
Educational only. This entry explains a term. It is not investment advice and does not recommend any trade, setting or strategy, and example numbers are illustrative, not results.
Related terms
Test the idea instead of taking it on trust
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