April 15, 2010

Is Forex Trading a 24/7 Operation?

Forex trading begins in financial hub of Australia – Sydney on Monday morning through Friday afternoon in the US West Coast. Someone around the globe is occupied in forex trading at any given instant.

It does terminate on weekends so it's not a proper 24/7 market. It's in a way 24/5.

forex ambush
So should you want to keep apprised about the appropriate opening and closing times of the forex market, consider time zones. A plain method to do this would be to use UTC units.

It was hitherto known as GMT which is Greenwich Mean Time and is at present UTC expanding to Universal Coordinated Time. This is the standard (winter) time in Greenwich, London which is the site of zero longitude on the sphere of earth.

In these terms, the routine operating hours of the forex market would be from Sunday 22:00 UTC to Friday, 22:00 UTC. This accords to10pm winter time in the UK.

Seeing that New York time is 5 hours behind UK time, the forex market globally would open and close at Sunday 5 pm and Friday 5 pm in New York, 2 pm at the west coast of the US, 11 pm at Germany and then 8 am Monday and 8 am Saturday in Australia, Sydney to be exact.

forex automoney
The hours of the different primary national markets are as aforementioned:

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

Contrarily, in Eastern US time or EST:

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

From the analysis it can be seen that the markets are in fact open 24 hours globally.

However, this does not compulsorily mean that trading will be good at all of these periods. When a significant market kicks off in its morning, price movement is quite unreliable and anomalous.

This is why knowledgeable traders will cease their trading for a period of as much as an hour 4 times a day when the major trade destinations commence their market day.

forex megadroid
Thus in theory, trading can be realized from Sunday to Friday, 24 hours routinely. Automated software in the shape of a forex robot can even make this physically attainable.

Nevertheless, a careful trader will choose his times and will not be active during all of the forex market hours.

Disclaimer: FX investing is risky, may end up in significant losses, and is not suitable for every person.

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