Forex Trading Market Hours: Can You Trade This Market Round The Clock?

 

The foreign exchange hours stretch from Monday morning in Sydney, Australia to Friday afternoon in New York. During that time the market is open somewhere around the world at all hours of the day or night.

Still, it is not a 24/7 market because it does shut down on weekends. 24/5 would be more appropriate.

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 simple when expressed in UTC. This is Universal Coordinated Time, earlier known as Greenwich Mean Time. This is the regular (winter) time in Greenwich, London which is the line of zero longitude on the earth.

New York is 5 hours behind the UK so the global currency exchange market opens and closes at 5 pm Sunday/Friday in New York, 2 pm on the US west coast, 23.00 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 operates in a different way in the southern half of the globe countries such as Australia which have summer time from September to March instead of March to September.

The hours of the various primary national markets are as follows:

Sydney: 10.00 pm to 7.00 am UTC
Tokyo: 12.00 midnight to 9.00 am UTC
London: 8.00 am to 5.00 pm UTC
New York: 1 pm to 10 pm UTC

Or we can express that in EST (Eastern US time):

Sydney: 5.00 pm to 2.00 am EST
Tokyo: 7 pm to 4 am EST
London: 3 am to 12 noon EST
New York: 8.00 am to 5.00 pm EST

You can see that these are equivalent to 24 hour cover.

However, this does not inevitably mean that trading will be normal at all of these times. Just after a key market opens, the rates can be highly fast-moving and erratic. Many traders will remain on the sidelines of the currency exchange market for up to an hour four times a day when the financial markets are waking up in these major cities.

The US dollar is the most traded currency by far, involved in 2.5 times as many trades as its nearest rival, the euro. This implies that news concerning the USA have a greater influence on the currency markets than news from other countries. The New York market begins to lose momentum around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are invested in a US dollar pair, this can be the right time to stop trading for the day.

So theoretically you can trade 24 hours a day from Sunday night to Friday night. Automated program in the form of a trading robot can even make this physically feasible. However, a cautious trader will pick his times and will not be active during all of the forex market hours. Furthermore, trusting hard-earned money on a robot is a risk many 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 substantially. There are many forex signal websites online, but always check out the past performance, and test the signals on a demo, prior to starting to trade with real money.