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

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

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

New York is 5 hours behind the UK so the global forex 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 complicated if you 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 hemisphere lands such as Australia which have summer season from September to March instead of March to September.

The hours of the various primary national markets are as follows:

Sydney: 10 pm to 7 am UTC
Tokyo: 12.00 midnight to 9.00 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 pm to 2 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 match to 24 hour cover.

Even so, this does not inevitably imply that trading will be good at all of these times. Just after a major market opens, the prices may be particularly fast-moving and erratic. Most traders will remain on the sidelines of the foreign exchange market for up to an hour four times a day when the financial markets are waking up in these major 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 indicates that news concerning the USA have a larger effect on the forex markets than events in other countries. The New York market tends to slow down 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 software in the form of a trading robot may even make this physically possible. However, a cautious trader will pick his times and will not be invested during all of the foreign exchange market hours. Furthermore, trusting hard-earned money on a robot is a risk most 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 dramatically. There are numerous forex signal websites online, but always check out the track record, and test the signals in simulation trading, before starting to trade with real money.

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