Forex market hours accessible to you will depend entirely on your location. If you need to find out the particular times that the markets open and close, you need to take the time zones into account. It is simple and easy when expressed in UTC. This is Universal Coordinated Time, in the past known as Greenwich Mean Time. This is the normal (winter) time in Greenwich, UK , the point of zero longitude on the globe.
So, the standard forex market hours are 22.00 Sunday UTC to 22.00 Friday UTC. That is 10 pm in the UK in winter season.
Even so it is not a 24/7 market since it does close down on weekends. 24 hours/5 days a week would definitely be more correct.
New York City is 5 hours behind the UK so the global foreign currency trading market opens and closes at 5 pm Sunday-Friday in New York, 2 pm on the US western coast, 11 pm in Munich, Germany, 8 am Monday-Saturday in Sydney.
Things get a more confusing when you start to try to take summer time daylight saving into consideration. This makes at least an hour difference in countries that observe it. Even so daylight saving functions in a different manner in the southern hemisphere countries such as Australia which have summer months from September till March instead of March until September.
The particular hours of the various major global markets are :
Sydney: 10 pm to 7 am UTC
Tokyo: 12 midnight to 9 am UTC
London: 8 am until 5 pm UTC
New York: 1 pm to 10 pm UTC
Or you can express that in (Eastern Standard time):
Sydney: 5 pm until 2 am EST
Tokyo: 7 pm till 4 am EST
London: 3 am till 12 noon EST
New York: 8 am to 5 pm EST
You can see that these correspond to 24 hour coverage.
Nevertheless, that will not necessarily mean that trading would be good at all these times. Right after a major market opens, the prices might possibly be very volatile and irregular. Many traders will avoid the currency market for roughly an hour four times a day when the trading markets are waking up in those major cities.
The $US is the most frequently traded forex by a long way, involved in 2.5 times as many trades as its closest rival the euro. What this means is that issues in the United States have a larger impact on the financial markets than events in other countries. The New York market seems to slow down around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are involved in a $US pair, this will be a good time to cease trading for the day.
So technically you can trade 24 hours a day from Sunday night until Friday night. Autopilot software in the form of a forex robot can probably make this physically possible. However, a meticulous trader will choose his times and will likely not be active during all of the forex market hours.
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