Forex Trading Market Hours: Would It Be Rewarding 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 somewhere around the globe at all hours of the day or night.
Even so, 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 exact 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, formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time. This is the standard (winter) time in Greenwich, London which is the point of zero longitude on the globe.
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, 14.00 on the US west coast, 11 pm in Germany, 8 am Monday/Saturday in Sydney.
Things get a little more difficult when you start to try to take summer time daylight saving into account. This makes one hour difference in countries that adopt it. But daylight saving functions 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 major national markets are as follows:
Sydney: 10 pm to 7 am UTC
Tokyo: 12.00 midnight to 9.00 am UTC
London: 8 am to 5 pm UTC
New York: 1.00 pm to 10.00 pm UTC
Or we can state that in EST (Eastern US time):
Sydney: 5 pm to 2 am EST
Tokyo: 7.00 pm to 4.00 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.
Anyhow, this does not inevitably mean that trading will be favorable at all of these times. Just after a leading market opens, the quotes can be extraordinarily volatile and erratic. Most traders will stay out of the forex 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 far, involved in 2.5 times as many trades as its nearest rival, the euro. This means that events in the USA have a bigger influence on the currency markets than events in other countries. The New York market tends to lose momentum around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are involved in a US dollar pair, this can be the right time to stop trading for the day.
So theoretically you can trade 24 hours a day from Sunday night to Friday night. Automated software in the form of a forex robot can even make this physically viable. However, a cautious trader will pick his times and will not be invested during all of the forex market hours. Furthermore, trusting hard-earned cash on a robot is a risk most people 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 numerous forex signal websites online, but always check out the past performance, and test the signals in simulation trading, before starting to trade with real money.