Forex Trading Market Hours: Does It Makes Sense To Trade This Market Round The Clock?

The currency market 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.

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

If you have to know the specific 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 standard (winter) time in Greenwich, London which is the line of zero longitude on the globe.

New York is 5 hours behind the UK so the global currency exchange 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 account. 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 lands such as Australia which have summer time from September to March instead of March to September.

The hours of the different main national markets are as follows:

Sydney: 10 pm to 7 am UTC
Tokyo: 12.00 midnight to 9.00 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: 5.00 pm to 2.00 am EST
Tokyo: 7.00 pm to 4.00 am EST
London: 3 am to 12 noon EST
New York: 8 am to 5 pm EST

You can see that these match to 24 hour cover.

Still, this does not inevitably mean that trading will be good at all of these times. Just after a major market opens, the quotes may be extraordinarily volatile and unpredictable. Many traders will remain on the sidelines of the foreign exchange market for up to an hour four times a day when the financial 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 nearest rival, the euro. This implies that news from the USA have a greater effect on the forex markets than events in other countries. The New York market tends to weaken around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are invested in a US dollar pair, this can be a good time to stop trading for the day.

So theoretically you can trade 24 hours a day from Sunday night to Friday night. Automated software in the form of a trading robot can even make this physically possible. However, a risk-averse trader will select his times and will not be active during all of the foreign exchange market hours. Moreover, trusting hard-earned cash on a robot is a risk most people 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 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.

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