The forex 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 globe at all hours of the day or night.
However it is not a 24/7 market because it does shut down on weekends. 24/5 would be more accurate. Even with the use of an automated trading system, like the Forex Megadroid Robot, 24/7 trading is not possible.
When working out the opening and closing times of the markets, you need to be aware of the various time zone differences. Markets often use GMT as a universal way of expressing the time. GMT stands for Greenwich Mean Time, although some people call is UTC (Universal Coordinated Time). This is the standard (winter) time in Greenwich, London which is the point of zero longitude on the globe.
So, the normal forex market hours are 22.00 Sunday GMT to 22.00 Friday GMT. This is 10 pm in the UK in winter time.
New York is 5 hours behind the UK so the global forex market opens and closes at 5 pm Sunday/Friday in New York, 2 pm on the US west coast, 11 pm in Germany, 8 am Monday/Saturday in Sydney.
Some countries operate on daylight savings time for part of the year, which complicates things a little further. This makes one hour difference in countries that observe it. For countries in the southern hemisphere like Australia, whose summer months are from September through to March, daylight saving effects them at a different time of year to the northern hemisphere.
The hours of the different major national markets are as follows:
Sydney: 10 pm to 7 am GMT
Tokyo: 12 midnight to 9 am GMT
London: 8 am to 5 pm GMT
New York: 1 pm to 10 pm GMT
Or we can express that in EST (Eastern US time)For New York, we can show that is EST:
Sydney: 5 pm to 2 am EST
Tokyo: 7 pm to 4 am EST
London: 3 am to 12 noon EST
New York: 8 am to 5 pm EST
You can see that these correspond to 24 hour cover.
During this 24 hour trading cycle, the markets will experience good an bad times to trade. Markets can become volatile with lots of activity just after the opening of a major market. Many traders will stay out of the forex 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 a long way, involved in 2.5 times as many trades as its nearest rival the Euro. For this reason, financial news coming out of the USA has a large impact on the various markets around the globe. The New York market tends to slow down around 3 pm local time (8 pm GMT) and if you are involved in a US dollar pair, many traders choose to end their trading day at this time.
In theory, you can trade forex 24 hours a day (excluding weekends). Automated software like the Forex Megadroid Robot can even make this physically possible. However, a cautious trader will choose his times and will not be active during all of the forex market hours.
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