The Currency Trading Zone

Forex Trading Hours

The forex market hours start on Monday morning in Sydney, Australia and end on Friday afternoon in New York. During that time frame Forex trading is taking place somewhere on the planet around the clock. Because forex trading is not done on the weekends it can only be called a twentyfour-five operation.

If you feel that you have to know the exact times of operation you will have to account for the varies time zones. This is not hard to do if you use UTC. UTC stands for Universal Coordinated Time, which was called Greenwich Mean Time. This is the zero longitude on the plant, and is located in Greenwich, London and is based on standard (winter) time there.

 This means, the forex market opens at 22.00 on Sunday UTC and closes at 22.00 Friday UTC. That makes it 10 pm in the UK during winter time. With New York being 5 hours earlier then the UK forex market will open and close at 5 pm on Sunday and Friday in New York, this then makes it 2 pm on the US west coast, in Germany 11 pm, and in Sydney it is 8 am Monday till Saturday.

If you head is not pounding yet then lets look at summer time daylight saving times. This creates a one hour difference in some countries that do observe it. Keep in mind that daylight saving times are different in countries in the southern hemisphere
like Australia with their summer time running from September to March while the northere run from March to September.

Here is a quick recap of the different major forex markets in UTC:

London: 8 am to 5 pm UTC
New York: 1 pm to 10 pm UTC
Sydney: 10 pm to 7 am UTC
Tokyo: 12 midnight to 9 am UTC

In Eastern Standard Time (US):

London: 3 am to 12 noon EST
New York: 8 am to 5 pm ES
Sydney: 5 pm to 2 am EST
Tokyo: 7 pm to 4 am EST

If you look at the above times You will notice that this gives 24 hour coverage.Now just because the forex market is open does not in any way mean that any time is good for trading. Any time one of the major markets opens,the prices may be very unpredictable and volatile. A lot of traders will not enter the forex market for as long as an hour up to four times during the day when a new major city is just opening.

There is no question that US dollar is the most active being traded, it is in two and a half times the trades as the euro which comes in at the number two spot. This translates into the fact that events that take place in the USA have a much greater
impact on the financial markets than any events that take place in other countries.

The New York forex market will tend to taper off around 3 pm New York time (8 pm UTC) and if you are trading a US dollar pair, You might want to consider ending your trading for the day.If we look at the time frame of the forex trading hours, you could theoretically trade for 24 hours a day for 5 days.

The use of automated software referred to as forex robots make this a realty. Most experience trader with or without a robot will choose their times to be in the market and are not active during all of the forex trading hours.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 4:16 am and is filed under Currency Trading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.