Forex Market Hours: Could You Buy And Sell Foreign Currency 24 Hours/7 Days?

By Erina Array

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Forex market hours available to you will be dependent entirely on your location. If you need to find out the precise times that the markets open and close, you need to take the time zones into consideration. It is simple when expressed in UTC. That is Universal Coordinated Time, previously known as Greenwich Mean Time. This is the standard (winter) time in Greenwich, London 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. This is 10 pm in the UK in winter time.

But nevertheless it is not a 24/7 market because it does close down on weekends. 24/5 would certainly be more precise.

New York is 5 hours behind the UK so the global foreign currency 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, Australia.

Things get a more complicated when you start to try to take summer time daylight saving into account. This makes an hour difference in countries that observe it. And yet daylight saving functions in a different way in the southern hemisphere which have summer time from September to March instead of March until September.

The actual hours of the different major global markets are as follows:

Sydney: 10 pm till 7 am UTC

Tokyo: 12 midnight to 9 am UTC

London: 8 am to 5 pm UTC

New York: 1 pm until 10 pm UTC

Or you can actually express that in EST (Eastern US time):

Sydney: 5 pm until 2 am EST

Tokyo: 7 pm to 4 am EST

London: 3 am to 12 noon EST

New York: 8 am until 5 pm EST

You will find that these correspond to 24 hour cover.

Even so, this does not automatically mean that trading is going to be good at all of these times. Soon after a principal market opens, the prices could be very volatile and irregular. Many brokers will stay out of the forex market for at least 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 closest rival the euro. This means that events in the United States have a larger impact on the financial markets than affairs in other countries. The New York market tends to slow down around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are involved in a US Dollar pair, this could be a good time to finish trading for the day.

So theoretically 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 actually make this physically achievable. However, a cautious trader will pick his times and would not be active during all of the forex market hours.

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