Busiest quarter-hour
09:15
8.8% of the day's volume
Intraday Volume Profile
At what time of day does most buying and selling actually happen in the Indian equity market? Measured from 1-minute bars on Nifty 50 futures across 46 trading sessions.
2026-07-29 → 2026-10-01 · 46 sessions · 34,208 bars · bucketed into 15-minute intervals
First 15 minutes
8.8%
Share of total day volume
Last 15 minutes
5.3%
Share of total day volume
U-shape fit
R² 0.589
U-shaped, symmetric about 12:23
The short answer
Volume is heavily concentrated at the edges of the session. The first hour trades 22.7% of the day's futures volume and the last hour another 21.0%, together 43.7% of the day in just two of the six trading hours. The remaining 56.3% is spread thinly across the middle of the session, where the profile flattens out.
The single busiest quarter-hour is 09:15 at 2.19× the average quarter-hour, and the quietest is 11:45 at 0.60× average.
Volume by time of day
Total futures volume per quarter-hour, ordered by clock time so the shape of the trading day is visible rather than sorted by size. This is the core answer.
Cumulative share of the day's volume
How much of the day is already done by each time. Read it as: if you could only watch until a given time, how much of the session would you have seen?
Fitted U-shape
The same profile as relative-to-average volume against a least-squares parabola fitted around the session midpoint. A high R² means a symmetric U genuinely describes the day; a low one means the shape is lopsided and the U is only a loose description.
Day of week × time of day
Volume relative to each weekday's own average quarter-hour. Reveals whether Monday's open and Friday's close behave differently from midweek.
Daily volume, session by session
Total volume in each session included in the sample, showing the day-to-day variation that sits underneath the average profile.
Concentration summary
| Window | Share of day |
|---|---|
| First 15 min (09:15–09:30) | 8.8% |
| First hour (09:15–10:15) | 22.7% |
| Last hour (14:30–15:30) | 21.0% |
| Last 15 min (15:15–15:30) | 5.3% |
| First + last hour combined | 43.7% |
| Everything in between | 56.3% |
Busiest and quietest quarter-hours
Top 5 by volume
- 09:158.8% · 2.19× avg
- 14:455.9% · 1.47× avg
- 15:155.3% · 1.32× avg
- 09:305.2% · 1.30× avg
- 15:005.1% · 1.27× avg
Bottom 5 by volume
- 11:452.4% · 0.60× avg
- 11:302.4% · 0.60× avg
- 11:152.5% · 0.61× avg
- 13:152.7% · 0.67× avg
- 10:302.9% · 0.73× avg
Contracts in the sample
| Contract | Expiry | Sessions | Bars |
|---|---|---|---|
| NIFTY-Oct2026-FUT | 2026-10-27 | 46 | 34,208 |
Data-integrity notes
Method choices that materially affect these numbers, stated rather than quietly applied.
- Instrument
- Nifty 50 index futures (NSE_FNO / FUTIDX), 1-minute bars from DhanHQ v2. The index itself carries no traded volume, so a futures contract is the proxy for real market activity.
- Futures roll
- Several Nifty futures are live at once, so their tradable spans overlap. Each contract was assigned a contiguous slice of the expiry axis and a bar was used only if its session date fell inside that slice, so every calendar day is counted exactly once. Summing all live contracts instead would double-count most days and materially inflate the profile.
- Sample size
- 46 trading days (2026-07-29 to 2026-10-01). Dhan's instrument master lists only currently tradable contracts, so expired ones cannot be refetched and a continuous multi-year futures series is not reconstructible from it alone. This is a short sample: read the profile as a description of these sessions, not a permanent seasonality law.
- Timestamps
- Dhan returns epoch seconds in UTC. NSE runs 09:15-15:30 IST with no DST, so time-of-day is derived with a fixed +05:30 shift rather than the host's local timezone, which would shift the whole profile on any machine not set to IST.
- Excluded sessions
- No expiry-day sessions fell inside the sample.
- Roll filter applied
- 1 session date(s) had bars outside a contract's ownership window and were dropped. Those are periods where only a later contract was the correct instrument to sample.
- Out-of-session bars
- 43 date(s) carried bars outside 09:15-15:30 IST (pre-open or post-close print timestamps) and were excluded from the profile.
- Daily cross-check
- Intraday sums were compared with the spot-index daily volume for 42 overlapping day(s); the median intraday total is 0.1% of the daily figure. A futures contract and the spot index are different instruments, so an exact match is not expected — this only rules out bucketing that is dropping or duplicating whole bars.