The currency market hours stretch from Monday morning in Sydney, Australia to Friday afternoon in New York. During that time the market is open at some place around the world at all hours of the day or night.

Still, it is not a 24/7 market because there is no trading on weekends. 24/5 would be more accurate.

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

New York is lagging 5 hours the UK so the global currency exchange 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.

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

The hours of the different major national markets are as follows:

Sydney: 10.00 pm to 7.00 am UTC
Tokyo: 12.00 midnight to 9.00 am UTC
London: 8.00 am to 5.00 pm UTC
New York: 1.00 pm to 10.00 pm UTC

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

Sydney: 5.00 pm to 2.00 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.

Anyway, this does not inevitably imply that trading will be stable at all of these times. Just after a key market opens, the quotes can be highly volatile and unpredictable. A lot of traders will remain on the sidelines of the currency exchange market for up to an hour 4 times a day when the financial markets are waking up in these main cities.

The US dollar is the most traded currency by a long way, involved in 2.5 times as many trades as its runner-up rival, the euro. This means that events in the USA have a bigger influence on the currency markets than news concerning other countries. The New York market tends to weaken around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are involved in a US dollar pair, this can be a good time to stop trading for the day.

So theoretically you can trade 24 hours a day from Sunday night to Friday night. Automated program in the form of a trading robot may even make this physically viable. However, a risk-averse trader will choose his times and will not be active during all of the forex market hours. Moreover, trusting hard-earned capital on a robot is a risk most traders are not willing to take. A much better approach is using forex signals. With reliable forex signals you can improve your risk-reward ratio substantially. There are many forex signal service providers online, but always check out the past performance, and test the signals on a demo, prior to starting to trade with real money.

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