Currency Exchange Market Hours: Would It Be Rewarding To Trade Currencies Round The Clock?

The currency market hours stretch from Monday morning in Sydney, Australia to Friday afternoon in New York. During that period 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 there is no trading on weekends. 24/5 would be more appropriate.

If you have to know the exact times that the markets open and close, you have to take time zones into consideration. It is very simple 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 earth.

New York is lagging 5 hours the UK so the worldwide foreign exchange market opens and closes at 5 pm Sunday/Friday in New York, 2 pm 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 consideration. This makes one hour difference in countries that adopt it. But daylight saving works in a different way in the southern half of the globe countries such as Australia which have summer time from September to March instead of March to September.

The hours of the different most significant 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 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 are equivalent to 24 hour cover.

Even so, this does not inevitably imply that trading will be stable at all of these times. Just after a primary market opens, the rates can be highly volatile and erratic. Most traders will remain on the sidelines of the foreign 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 a long way, involved in 2.5 times as many trades as its runner-up rival, the euro. This means that news concerning the USA have a larger effect on the forex markets than news concerning other countries. The New York market starts to lose momentum around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are involved in a US dollar pair, this can 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 may even make this physically viable. Even so, a risk-averse trader will choose his times and will not be active during all of the forex market hours. Furthermore, 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 many forex signal service providers online, but always check out the past performance, and test the signals in simulation trading, before starting to trade with real money.

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