The foreign exchange hours extend from Monday morning in Sydney, Australia to Friday afternoon in New York. During that time the market is open at some place around the world at all hours of the day or night.
Still, it is not a 24/7 market because it does shut down on weekends. 24/5 would be more precise.
If you have to know the exact times that the markets open and close, you have to take time zones into account. It is very easy when expressed in UTC. This is Universal Coordinated Time, formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time. This is the regular (winter) time in Greenwich, London which is the line of zero longitude on the earth.
New York is 5 hours behind the UK so the worldwide currency exchange market opens and closes at 5 pm Sunday/Friday in New York, 14.00 on the US west coast, 23.00 in Germany, 8 am Monday/Saturday in Sydney.
Things get a little more difficult if you try to take summer time daylight saving into consideration. This makes one hour difference in countries that observe it. But daylight saving functions in a different way in the southern half of the globe countries such as Australia which have summer season from September to March instead of March to September.
The hours of the various leading national markets are as follows:
Sydney: 10.00 pm to 7.00 am UTC
Tokyo: 12.00 midnight to 9.00 am UTC
London: 8.00 am to 5.00 pm UTC
New York: 1 pm to 10 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: 3.00 am to 12.00 noon EST
New York: 8.00 am to 5.00 pm EST
You can see that these correspond to 24 hour cover.
Anyway, this does not inevitably imply that trading will be favorable at all of these times. Just after a leading market opens, the quotes can be extremely fast-moving and unpredictable. A lot of traders will remain on the sidelines of the currency exchange market for up to an hour four 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 indicates that events in the USA have a bigger effect on the currency markets than news from other countries. The New York market begins to weaken around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are involved in a US dollar pair, this could 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 program in the form of a trading robot may even make this physically feasible. Still, a risk-averse trader will choose his times and will not be invested during all of the foreign exchange market hours. Moreover, trusting hard-earned capital on a robot is a risk most traders are not willing to take. A much better idea is using forex signals. With
reliable forex signals you can improve your risk profile substantially. There are many forex signal websites online, but always check out the track record, and test the signals on a demo, prior to starting to trade with real money.
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