Forex Market Hours: Could You Buy And Sell Foreign Currency 24 Hours/7 Days?
By Erina Array
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Forex market hours accessible to you will be dependent entirely on your location. If you need to find out the particular times that the Forex markets open and close, you will need to take the time zones into consideration. It is easy to understand when expressed in UTC. This is Universal Coordinated Time, originally referred to as Greenwich Mean Time. This is the standard (winter) time in Greenwich, UK which is the position of zero longitude on the globe.
So, the customary forex market hours are 22.00 Sunday UTC to 22.00 Friday UTC. Which is 10 pm in the UK in mid winter.
Nevertheless it is not a 24 hours/7 days a week market simply because it does shut on weekends. 24 hours/5 days a week would be more accurate.
New York City is 5 hours behind the UK so the global currency exchange market opens and closes at 5 pm Sunday-Friday in NY, 2 pm on the US west coast, 11 pm in Germany, 8 am Monday/Saturday in Sydney, Australia.
Things soon get a more complicated when you begin to attempt to take summer time daylight saving into account. This will make an hour or so variance in nations that observe it. However daylight saving will work in a different way in the southern hemisphere which have summer time from September to March instead of March until September.
The hours of the different primary global Forex markets are :
Sydney: 10 pm until 7 am UTC
Tokyo: 12 midnight to 9 am UTC
London: 8 am till 5 pm UTC
New York: 1 pm to 10 pm UTC
Or we can express that in EST (Eastern Standard time):
Sydney: 5 pm to 2 am EST
Tokyo: 7 pm until 4 am EST
London: 3 am until 12 noon EST
New York: 8 am till 5 pm EST
You will notice that these correspond to 24 hour cover.
Unfortunately, that does not generally mean that trading is definitely good at all these times. Right after a primary market opens, the prices may be very volatile and erratic. Many professionals will avoid the trading market for at least an hour four times a day when the Forex markets are waking up in those major cities.
The $US is the most traded currency by a long way, involved in 2.5 times as many trades as its closest rival the euro. This simply means that affairs in the United States have a greater effect on the trading markets than affairs in other nations. The New York market has the tendency to decline around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are involved in a US dollar pair, this might be a great time to stop trading for the day.
So in theory you can trade 24 hours per day from Sunday night till Friday night. Automated software in the form of a forex robot can even make this physically achievable. Having said that, a vigilant trader will pick his times and may not be trading during all of the forex market hours.
