Foreign Exchange Trading Market Hours: Is It Possible To Trade Currency All The Day?
by Chris on February 15, 2010
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 there is no trading on weekends. 24/5 would be more precise.
If you have to know the specific times that the markets open and close, you have to take time zones into account. It is very simple 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 earth.
New York is lagging 5 hours the UK so the worldwide currency exchange market opens and closes at 17.00 Sunday/Friday in New York, 14.00 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 adopt it. But daylight saving functions in a different way in the southern half of the globe lands such as Australia which have summer season from September to March instead of March to September.
The hours of the different leading national markets are as follows:
Sydney: 10 pm to 7 am UTC
Tokyo: 12.00 midnight to 9.00 am UTC
London: 8.00 am to 5.00 pm UTC
New York: 1.00 pm to 10.00 pm UTC
Or we can state 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: 3.00 am to 12.00 noon EST
New York: 8 am to 5 pm EST
You can see that these correspond to 24 hour cover.
Even so, this does not inevitably imply that trading will be reliable at all of these times. Just after a main market opens, the quotes may be extremely volatile and unpredictable. Most traders will remain on the sidelines of the currency exchange market for up to an hour 4 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 implies that news from the USA have a larger effect on the currency markets than events concerning other countries. The New York market begins to weaken around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are invested in a US dollar pair, this could 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 may even make this physically viable. Still, a risk-averse trader will select his times and will not be invested 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 approach is using forex signals. With reliable forex signals you can improve your risk profile substantially. There are numerous forex signal websites 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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