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Currency Exchange Market Hours: Does It Makes Sense To Trade This Market Round The Clock?



The currency market hours extend from Monday morning in Sydney, Australia to Friday afternoon in New York. During that period the market is open somewhere around the globe at all hours of the day or night.

However, it is not a 24/7 market because there is no trading 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 consideration. It is very easy when expressed in UTC. This is Universal Coordinated Time, earlier known as Greenwich Mean Time. This is the standard (winter) time in Greenwich, London which is the line of zero longitude on the earth.

New York is lagging 5 hours the UK so the global forex market opens and closes at 17.00 Sunday/Friday in New York, 2 pm on the US west coast, 23.00 in Germany, 8.00 Monday/Saturday in Sydney.

Things get a little complicated when you start to try to take summer time daylight saving into account. This makes one hour difference in countries that observe it. But daylight saving operates in a different way in the southern hemisphere countries such as Australia which have summer time from September to March instead of March to September.

The hours of the different most important 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: 1.00 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 pm to 4 am EST
London: 3 am to 12 noon EST
New York: 8 am to 5 pm EST

You can see that these match to 24 hour cover.

Even so, this does not inevitably mean that trading will be stable at all of these times. Just after a key market opens, the quotes may be extremely volatile and unpredictable. Most traders will stay out of the foreign exchange market for up to an hour 4 times a day when the financial 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 next rival, the euro. This indicates that news concerning the USA have a greater influence on the forex markets than events in other countries. The New York market starts to slow down around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are involved in a US dollar pair, this can be a good 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 forex robot may even make this physically viable. However, a risk-averse trader will choose his times and will not be active during all of the currency exchange market hours. Furthermore, trusting hard-earned capital on a robot is a risk many people are not willing to take. A much better idea is using forex signals. With reliable forex signals you can improve your risk profile dramatically. There are numerous forex signal service providers online, but always check out the past performance, and test the signals on a demo, prior to starting to trade with real money.

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