Forex Trading Hours: Can You Trade Forex 24/7?
Global forex trading takes place from Monday morning in Sydney, Australia to Friday afternoon in New York. With all the markets in between, this makes forex trading possible during every hour of the day.
That said, the markets do close on Saturday and Sunday, so it is not possible to be trading 24/7. Even with the use of an automated trading system, like the Forex Megadroid Robot, 24/7 trading is not possible.
When working out the opening and closing times of the markets, you need to be aware of the various time zone differences. 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). GMT (or UTC) is the UK‘s winter time, and is used because Greenwich in London is at point zero longitude.
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.
Some countries operate on daylight savings time for part of the year, which complicates things a little further. 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
You can see that these correspond to 24 hour cover.
During this 24 hour trading cycle, the markets will experience good an bad times to trade. Just after a major market opens, the prices can be very volatile and unpredictable. 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. Even a trading robot, such as the Forex Megadroid Download, will become inactive at these times.
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. For this reason, financial news coming out of the USA has a large impact on the various markets around the globe. 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, this can be a good time to stop trading for the day.
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.