Foreign Exchange Market Hours: Does It Makes Sense To Trade Currencies 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 at some place 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 precise.
If you need to know the specific times that the markets open and close, you have to take time zones into account. It is very uncomplicated when expressed in UTC. This is Universal Coordinated Time, earlier 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 lagging 5 hours the UK so the global currency exchange market opens and closes at 5 pm Sunday/Friday in New York, 14.00 on the US west coast, 11 pm in Germany, 8.00 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 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 different main national markets are as follows:
Sydney: 10.00 pm to 7.00 am UTC
Tokyo: 12 midnight to 9 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: 7.00 pm to 4.00 am EST
London: 3.00 am to 12.00 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 good at all of these times. Just after a primary market opens, the rates may be very volatile and erratic. Many traders will remain on the sidelines of the foreign exchange market for up to an hour four times a day when the currency markets are waking up in these major cities.
The US dollar is the most traded currency by a long way, involved in 2.5 times as many trades as its runner-up rival, the euro. This means that events in the USA have a greater effect on the forex markets than news from 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 could be a good 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 can even make this physically possible. However, a cautious trader will choose his times and will not be active during all of the foreign exchange market hours. Furthermore, trusting hard-earned capital on a robot is a risk many 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 many forex signal websites online, but always check out the track record, and test the signals in simulation trading, prior to starting to trade with real money.
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