Forex Trading Hours: Can You Trade Forex 24/7?

Submitted by: G. B. Wiley

The forex market 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.

However it is not a 24/7 market because it does shut down on weekends. 24/5 would be more accurate. Even with the use of an automated trading system, like the Forex Megadroid Robot, 24/7 trading is not possible.

If you need to know the exact times that the markets open and close, you have to take time zones into consideration. Markets often use GMT as a universal way of expressing the time. GMT stands for Greenwich Mean Time, although some people call is UTC (Universal Coordinated Time). This is the standard (winter) time in Greenwich, London which is the point of zero longitude on the globe.

So, the normal forex market hours are 22.00 Sunday GMT to 22.00 Friday GMT. This is 10 pm in the UK in winter time.

New York is 5 hours behind the UK so the global forex 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.

Things get a little complicated when you start to try to take summer time daylight saving into account. Daylight saving time means the actual time is ahead ny one hour in those countries. For countries in the southern hemisphere like Australia, whose summer months are from September through to March, daylight saving effects them at a different time of year to the northern hemisphere.

Here are the trading times of some of the big markets:

Sydney: 10 pm to 7 am GMT

Tokyo: 12 midnight to 9 am GMT

London: 8 am to 5 pm GMT

New York: 1 pm to 10 pm GMT

{Or we can express that in EST (Eastern US time)For New York, we can show that is EST}:

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

Now you can see how the markets are open 24 hours.

During this 24 hour trading cycle, the markets will experience good an bad times to trade. Markets can become volatile with lots of activity just after the opening of a major market. It is common for traders to stop trading for an hour or so after a major market opens, due to this high level of volatility and unpredictability.

The US dollar and the Euro are the two most traded currencies, although the dollar is way ahead being involved in 2.5 times the number of trades than the Euro is. This means that events in the USA have a greater impact on the financial markets than events in other countries. The New York market tends to slow down around 3 pm local time (8 pm GMT) and if you are involved in a US dollar pair, many traders choose to end their trading day at this time.

In theory, you can trade forex 24 hours a day (excluding weekends). Automated software like the Forex Megadroid Robot can even make this physically possible. However, a cautious trader will choose his times and will not be active during all of the forex market hours.

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Source:

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