The foreign exchange market commences from Monday morning in Shenzen, China to Friday afternoon in New York. All day and night at least one place on the globe, forex is traded.

Yet it is not a 24/7 market since it does close during weekends. It’s more like 24/5.

forex ambush
You ought to understand time zones though in order to identify exactly when the global markets will open and close. By using UTC, it becomes an undemanding task.

Greenwich or GMT is the one-time sobriquet of UTC or Universal Coordinated Time. It is the normal winter time at zero longitude on the globe and the actual location is Greenwich, London.

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

New York is 5 hours behind the UK so the international currency market begins 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.

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 through 12 noon EST New York: 8 am through 5 pm EST

It’s visible here that markets do work 24 hours a day in a global sense.

24 hour market trade does not designate that all 24 hours are suited for good trading. Early minutes of post opening trading in serious markets are usually delineated by extremely unstable price movements.

This is why knowledgeable traders will delay 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
In theory then, trading can be consummated from Sunday night till Friday night, 24 hours daily. In reality, this is made viable foreign exchange software bots.

But the prudent trader trades during optimal times and is eventually not trading during the consolidated operating hours of the foreign exchange market.

Disclaimer: Forex investing can be dangerous, can end up in substantial losses, and is not suited for everyone.