If you've ever placed a trade during the Asian session and watched it go nowhere for hours, you already understand the problem. The forex market is open 24 hours a day, but it's not active 24 hours a day. Most of the real price movement happens in two narrow windows, and those windows are what traders call kill zones.
A kill zone is a specific time window during the trading day when institutional participants, banks, hedge funds, and large market makers, are most active. This is when the bulk of daily volume is placed, when liquidity sweeps happen, and when significant price moves originate.
Trading outside these windows means trading thin markets where spreads widen, moves are unpredictable, and the institutional footprints that price action analysis depends on simply aren't there.
"The kill zone isn't a strategy, it's a filter. It separates high-probability execution windows from noise."
The London open drives the first major move of the day. Institutional liquidity sweeps often happen in this window, giving ARIA the CHoCH confirmation needed for Phase A signals.
The NY open overlaps with late London, creating peak volume. Price frequently reverses or accelerates here, creating high-conviction setups with clean structure.
ARIA scans across the full London (07:00–10:00 UTC) and New York (12:00–16:00 UTC) sessions for Phase B and C signals. But Phase A signals, the highest conviction setups, are restricted to the first 30 minutes of each session. That's when the displacement moves happen. That's when the institutional orders hit. Miss that window and the entry is often gone.
"Kill zone discipline is what separates ARIA from services that send signals at 2AM and call it analysis."
Understanding kill zones is step one. The next step is understanding what ARIA looks for inside those windows, and that starts with supply and demand zones.