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Currency Trading Market Hours: Is It Possible To Trade This Market Round The Clock?
The foreign exchange hours extend from Monday morning in Sydney, Australia to Friday afternoon in New York. During that period the market is open at some place around the world at all hours of the day or night.
However, it is not a 24/7 market because it does shut down on weekends. 24/5 would be more precise.
If you have to know the exact times that the markets open and close, you have to take time zones into consideration. It is very easy when expressed in UTC. This is Universal Coordinated Time, formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time. This is the regular (winter) time in Greenwich, London which is the point of zero longitude on the globe.
New York is lagging 5 hours the UK so the global forex market opens and closes at 17.00 Sunday/Friday in New York, 2 pm on the US west coast, 11 pm in Germany, 8 am Monday/Saturday in Sydney.
Things get a little complicated if you try to take summer time daylight saving into consideration. This makes one hour difference in countries that observe it. But daylight saving works in a different way in the southern hemisphere countries such as Australia which have summer season from September to March instead of March to September.
The hours of the various leading national markets are as follows:
Sydney: 10.00 pm to 7.00 am UTC
Tokyo: 12 midnight to 9 am UTC
London: 8 am to 5 pm UTC
New York: 1 pm to 10 pm UTC
Or we can express that in EST (Eastern US time):
Sydney: 5 pm to 2 am EST
Tokyo: 7.00 pm to 4.00 am EST
London: 3.00 am to 12.00 noon EST
New York: 8 am to 5 pm EST
You can see that these are equivalent to 24 hour cover.
Anyway, this does not necessarily imply that trading will be normal at all of these times. Just after a leading market opens, the quotes can be extraordinarily volatile and erratic. A lot of traders will remain on the sidelines of the currency exchange market for up to an hour four times a day when the currency markets are waking up in these main cities.
The US dollar is the most traded currency by far, involved in 2.5 times as many trades as its runner-up rival, the euro. This suggests that news from the USA have a bigger impact on the currency markets than events in other countries. The New York market tends to slow down around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are involved in a US dollar pair, this can be the right time to stop trading for the day.
So theoretically you could trade 24 hours a day from Sunday night to Friday night. Automated software in the form of a trading robot may even make this physically possible. However, a risk-averse trader will select his times and will not be active during all of the forex market hours. Moreover, trusting hard-earned money on a robot is a risk most traders are not willing to take. A much better idea is using forex signals. With reliable forex signals you can improve your risk-reward ratio dramatically. There are numerous forex signal service providers online, but always check out the past performance, and test the signals on a demo, before starting to trade with real money.
