The foreign exchange hours extend from Monday morning in Sydney, Australia to Friday afternoon in New York. During that period the market is open at some place around the globe at all hours of the day or night.

Still, it is not a 24/7 market because it does shut down on weekends. 24/5 would be more accurate.

If you have to know the specific times that the markets open and close, you have to take time zones into account. It is very uncomplicated when expressed in UTC. This is Universal Coordinated Time, earlier known as Greenwich Mean Time. This is the regular (winter) time in Greenwich, London which is the point of zero longitude on the earth.

New York is 5 hours behind the UK so the global foreign exchange market opens and closes at 17.00 Sunday/Friday in New York, 14.00 on the US west coast, 23.00 in Germany, 8.00 Monday/Saturday in Sydney.

Things get a little more difficult when you start to try to take summer time daylight saving into consideration. This makes one hour difference in countries that observe it. But daylight saving operates in a different way in the southern half of the globe lands such as Australia which have summer season from September to March instead of March to September.

The hours of the various most important national markets are as follows:

Sydney: 10.00 pm to 7.00 am UTC
Tokyo: 12 midnight to 9 am UTC
London: 8.00 am to 5.00 pm UTC
New York: 1 pm to 10 pm UTC

Or we can express that in EST (Eastern US time):

Sydney: 5.00 pm to 2.00 am EST
Tokyo: 7.00 pm to 4.00 am EST
London: 3.00 am to 12.00 noon EST
New York: 8.00 am to 5.00 pm EST

You can see that these are equivalent to 24 hour cover.

Anyway, this does not necessarily imply that trading will be good at all of these times. Just after a key market opens, the rates may be extremely fast-moving and erratic. A lot of traders will stay out of the currency exchange market for up to an hour four times a day when the financial markets are waking up in these main cities.

The US dollar is the most traded currency by far, involved in 2.5 times as many trades as its next rival, the euro. This suggests that events concerning the USA have a bigger impact on the currency markets than events in other countries. The New York market tends to lose momentum around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are invested in a US dollar pair, this could be the right time to stop trading for the day.

So theoretically you could trade 24 hours a day from Sunday night to Friday night. Automated program in the form of a forex robot may even make this physically possible. However, a risk-averse trader will pick his times and will not be invested during all of the currency exchange market hours. Furthermore, trusting hard-earned capital on a robot is a risk many traders are not willing to take. A much better idea is using forex signals. With reliable forex signals you can improve your risk-reward ratio substantially. There are numerous forex signal websites online, but always check out the track record, and test the signals in simulation trading, prior to starting to trade on real account.

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