Forex Market Hours: Could You Exchange Currency 24 Hours/7 Days?


Forex market hours readily available to you will depend entirely on your location. If you need to find out the particular times that the markets open and close, you also have to take time zones into consideration. It is very simple when expressed in UTC. That is Universal Coordinated Time, originally referred to as Greenwich Mean Time. This is the normal (winter) time in Greenwich, UK which is the position of zero longitude on the globe.

So, the general forex market hours are 22.00 Sunday UTC to 22.00 Friday UTC. Which is 10 pm in the UK in winter season.

Nevertheless it is not a 24/7 market because it does close down on Saturdays and Sundays. 24/5 may be more factual.

New York is five hours behind the UK so the global forex market opens and closes at 5 pm Sunday-Friday in NY, 2 pm on the US western coast, 11 pm in Munich, Germany, 8 am Monday/Saturday in Sydney, Australia.

Times get a more confusing when you start to attempt to take summer time daylight saving into consideration. This will make an hour variation in countries that observe it. On the other hand daylight saving performs in a different manner in the southern hemisphere which have summer time from September to March instead of March to September.

The actual hours of the various best known national Forex markets are :

Sydney: 10 pm to 7 am UTC

Tokyo: 12 midnight to 9 am UTC

London: 8 am to 5 pm UTC

New York: 1 pm till 10 pm UTC

Or we often express that in EST (Eastern Standard time):

Sydney: 5 pm to 2 am EST

Tokyo: 7 pm till 4 am EST

London: 3 am until 12 noon EST

New York: 8 am until 5 pm EST

You can see that these correspond to 24 hour cover.

Nevertheless, that will not automatically mean that trading is definitely good at all of those times. Soon after a Forex market opens, the prices might be very volatile and changeable. Many traders will avoid the exchange market for as much as an hour four times a day when the trading 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. This implies that the situation in the USA have a more significant impact on the trading markets than affairs in other countries. The New York market has a tendency to decline around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are involved in a US Dollar pair, this may very well be a great time to halt trading for the session.

So technically you can trade 24 hours on a daily basis from Sunday night to Friday night. Automated software in the form of a forex robot can probably make this physically possible. In spite of this, a meticulous trader will determine his times and will likely not be trading throughout all of the forex market hours.


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