So to add a bit of substance to this gut feeling, I thought let's run some db queries on Bitfinex's trade history and see if my hunch actually holds some truth.
Posting just a few numbers isn't fun, so I made a few nice charts, displaying the total volume of all transactions executed on Bitfinex since April 1 2013, specified by the day of the week.
And since I was doing this anyway I also plotted hour of the day vs total volume in a nifty chart. Some moments of the day quite often seem busier than others so let's test that as well.
Of course I realise there are numerous reasons for these patterns to occur, but that's not what i'm trying to explain. I only wanted to test wether some hours of the day have been in the past, busier than others and if sone days of the week have been busier than others. No hard guarantees for the future of course but I do think I've proven my hypothesis that Fridays have been busier than all other days of the week (which most of you knew anyway
and that 16-17 pm UTC have been the busiest hour of the day.
I made charts for all currency pairs available at Bitfinex. Patterns are less clear in the other pairs, but also there are far less transactions in pairs other than BTCUSD, so big transaction (and rallies and panics) will distort the charts more than in BTCUSD. To illustrate this: The BTCUSD charts are based on 1.9 Million transactions, LTCUSD 285k transactions, LTCBTC: 133k transactions, DRKUSD: 8.8k transactions, DRKBTC: 12k transactions.
I would have made these charts for other exchanges, but I only have a full transaction history for Bitfinex…
You can find all charts here:
http://www.bfxdata.com/analysis/volumeperiod.php
Regards Bjorn
Developer of BFXdata.com