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

The currency market 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 globe at all hours of the day or night.

However, it is not a 24/7 market because there is no trading on weekends. 24/5 would be more accurate.

If you need to know the specific times that the markets open and close, you have to take time zones into consideration. It is very uncomplicated 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 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, 23.00 in Germany, 8.00 Monday/Saturday in Sydney.

Things get a little more difficult when you start to try to take summer time daylight saving into account. This makes one hour difference in countries that adopt it. But daylight saving operates in a different way in the southern hemisphere lands such as Australia which have summer time from September to March instead of March to September.

The hours of the various most significant 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: 1.00 pm to 10.00 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 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.

Even so, this does not necessarily mean that trading will be normal at all of these times. Just after a major market opens, the prices may be highly fast-moving and erratic. Most traders will stay out of the forex market for up to an hour 4 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 runner-up rival, the euro. This suggests that news concerning the USA have a larger impact on the financial markets than news concerning other countries. The New York market tends to slow down 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 could trade 24 hours a day from Sunday night to Friday night. Automated program in the form of a forex robot can even make this physically viable. However, a cautious trader will pick his times and will not be active during all of the currency exchange market hours. Furthermore, trusting hard-earned money on a robot is a risk many people are not willing to take. A much better approach 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 track record, and test the signals in simulation trading, prior to starting to trade on real account.

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