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Killzones are a concept popularized by the ICT trading style, and behind the dramatic name is a simple, useful idea: not all session hours are equal, and a few specific windows produce most of the meaningful moves. Rather than watching the whole session, you focus on the hours where the action concentrates.
The two most watched killzones are the London open window and the New York open window. The London killzone covers the few hours around the London open, when the Asia range is often broken and the day's trend frequently begins. The New York killzone covers the hours around the New York open, overlapping London, when the second wave of volatility hits. These windows are where a large share of the clean, tradable moves happen.
The point of a killzone is focus and discipline. Instead of trading all day and getting chopped in the dead hours, you wait for these high probability windows and take your setups there. Outside them, you are more patient or you stand aside. It is a filter on time, and time is one of the most underused filters in trading.
Marking them cleanly matters. A chart cluttered with a dozen lines is useless. The clean approach is a light shaded box over each killzone window, sitting behind the candles so it gives context without hiding price. When your setup lines up inside a killzone, you have both a price reason and a timing reason to act. When the same setup appears at 3am, the missing timing tells you to pass. Killzones do not create edges by themselves, they concentrate your attention on the hours where edges are most likely to appear.
