Forex Market Hours: Is It Possible To Buy And Sell Forex 24/7?

Forex market hours readily available to you will depend completely on your location. If you want to find out the precise times that the markets open and close, you have to take the time zones into consideration. It is simple when expressed in UTC. It is Universal Coordinated Time, previously referred to as Greenwich Mean Time. This is the standard (winter) time in Greenwich , the point of zero longitude on the globe.

So, the customary forex market hours are 22.00 Sunday UTC to 22.00 Friday UTC. That is 10 pm in the UK in mid-winter.

Even so it is not a 24/7 market seeing that it does shut on Saturdays and Sundays. 24 hours/5 days a week might be more correct.

New York is five hours behind the UK so the global foreign exchange market opens and closes at 5 pm Sunday/Friday in NY, 2 pm on the US western seaboard, 11 pm in Munich, Germany, 8 am Monday/Saturday in Sydney.

Times get a little more complicated when you start to try to take daylight saving into consideration. This makes an hour or so difference in regions that observe it. But daylight saving operates in a different manner in the southern hemisphere which have summer time from September till March instead of March to September.

The hours of the different important national Forex markets are :

Sydney: 10 pm until 7 am UTC

Tokyo: 12 midnight until 9 am UTC

London: 8 am till 5 pm UTC

New York: 1 pm to 10 pm UTC

Or we often express that in EST (Eastern Standard time):

Sydney: 5 pm until 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 will notice that these correspond to 24 hour cover.

However, that may not necessarily mean that trading is actually good at all of those times. Just after a Forex market opens, the prices can be very volatile and changeable. Many forex traders will stay out of the currency trading market for for approximately an hour four times a day when the financial markets are waking up in those major cities.

The US dollar is the most traded forex by a long way, involved in 2.5 times as many trades as its closest rival the euro. Which means that activities in the US have a greater impact on the financial markets than events in other countries. The New York market tends to decline around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are involved in a $US pair, this could very well be a great time to halt trading for the day.

So technically you can trade 24 hours per day from Sunday night until Friday night. Automated software in the form of a forex robot can perhaps even make this physically workable. Even so, a careful trader will determine his times and will never be active during all of the forex market hours.

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