Where I worked, we had a pretty hectic schedule at the start when we were in the internship phase commonly doing 12 hour days. This was generally the time where the weaker or struggling people got weeded out of the program. Once passed & live, our day looked some what different as we could come and go as we pleased once we hit targets. But generally speaking, our day looked like this for the first 6 months of trading live money. ( All times London time) We focused on futures markets usually.
7–9am : Arrive in to trade the European Open, usually the Dax, Eurostoxx, Cac, Ftse or a spread trade of merging 2 markets together.
9–10:30: We could trade the bond market like the bund if there was any early news announcements out that day.
10:30–13:00: Hit the gym, catch up on sleep, whatever tickles your fancy really as the markets were usually quiet for us during this time.
13:10–14:30 : We traded the pit open of oil or if there was any news out or geopolitical events, we’d go where the volatility took us.
14:30–16:30: We traded the US open, mainly indexes. This was our “important zone” that would usually determine if the risk desk would let us trade bigger size on the day depending on how much money we made up to that point. If we were down near our allowable daily loss, risk would usually cut our size or force us to stop trading at 16:30 to avoid compounding the problem.
16:30–18:00 : Do as you please, get food, relax, whatever you needed to do to get refocused & like I said if you were near your daily loss limit, your day might end at 16:30.
18:00–19:00 : we’d get ready and trade sugar settlement which usually brought volatility into that market. We may also have trade Cotton or Cocoa futures too depending on where the action was. We always needed volatility for what we were doing. ( Cotton was always so illiquid so you can imagine how stressful that could be sometimes )
19:30- 21:00: Trade the US close if there was volatility. This was discretionary as it could be super quiet or if you had a good day, you might not want to push it.
This is how my day looked like around 2010–2012. On Fridays, you could also add in on our free time at 10:30 – 13:00, we’d have performance reviews where 6 of us would go into a room and present our performance to the head traders and talk them through our thought process. This was usually just for the first 6 months though of trading live money. After that, the time table changed and we had more freedom to trade as we wished as long as we were obviously making money.
I remember some traders literally only trading 2 hours and making plenty of money but to get to that level, we had to experience all the different markets in the above timetable for the first 6 months. Keep in mind that this timetable was applicable to us around 2010 & times of opens/ settlements may have changed since then. Hope that helps