Forex market hours (live session clock)

The four forex sessions

Currencies trade over the counter between banks, brokers and funds, not on one exchange with an opening bell. The market therefore follows the working day around the planet: when Sydney's dealers arrive on Monday morning it is still Sunday evening in New York, and by the time New York goes home on Friday, Sydney is asleep on Saturday morning. That gives the five-day, 24-hour week.

The day is conventionally split into four sessions named after the cities that dominate them. Exact hours vary by source by an hour or so; this page uses the common convention of a nine-hour local business day:

• Sydney, 07:00 to 16:00 Sydney time. Opens the week. Volume is the lightest of the four, with the Australian and New Zealand dollars most active.
• Tokyo, 09:00 to 18:00 Tokyo time. The main Asian session, with the yen and Asia-Pacific pairs most active. Ranges are often narrower than later in the day.
• London, 08:00 to 17:00 London time. The largest centre by turnover. The euro, sterling and Swiss franc are most active, and the day's direction is often set here.
• New York, 08:00 to 17:00 New York time. US economic data (usually at 08:30 New York time) and the overlap with London make the first half of this session the most active part of the day for US dollar pairs.

For a longer explanation of how each session behaves, see the trading sessions guide and the academy lesson on currency pairs and trading sessions.

Best times to trade, pair by pair

"Best" here means when a pair is usually most liquid, with tighter spreads and more movement. It does not mean when it is easiest to make money: active hours also bring sharper moves against you. Typical patterns, in UTC during northern summer (add an hour in winter for the London and New York times):

The quiet hours matter as much. Between the New York close and the Tokyo open, and especially in the hour either side of 17:00 New York time when brokers roll positions to the next day, spreads widen and fills can be poor. A stop placed tight to the price can be touched by a spread spike alone. The lot size calculator lets you keep the money at risk constant if you widen a stop for quieter hours.

The overlaps, and a worked example

An overlap is a stretch when two centres are open at once. Two sets of banks and funds are trading the same pairs, so turnover rises and spreads tend to be tightest. There are three:

• London and New York: 08:00 to 12:00 New York time, four hours all year in New York's own clock. This is the busiest window of the day and the one most short-term traders build their routine around.
• Tokyo and London: one or two hours around the London open, depending on the season.
• Sydney and Tokyo: five or six hours in the Asian morning.

Worked example. A trader in Dubai (UTC+4, no daylight saving) wants to know when the London and New York overlap falls locally. In northern summer the overlap is 12:00 to 16:00 UTC, so it runs 16:00 to 20:00 Dubai time. In winter it is 13:00 to 17:00 UTC, so 17:00 to 21:00. For three weeks in March it starts at 16:00 and runs to 21:00, because New York has moved its clocks and London has not (next section). Pick Dubai in the clock above and it does this arithmetic for whatever week you are in.

Daylight saving: why the hours move

Session times are fixed in local time, so their UTC times move whenever a city changes its clocks. Three rules are involved, and they do not line up:

• United States: clocks go forward on the second Sunday of March and back on the first Sunday of November.
• United Kingdom and the EU: forward on the last Sunday of March, back on the last Sunday of October.
• Australia (Sydney): the opposite season. Forward on the first Sunday of October, back on the first Sunday of April. Tokyo does not use daylight saving at all.

The result is a few odd weeks each year. From mid to late March, New York is on summer time and London is not, so for about three weeks the US session opens an hour earlier for European traders and the London and New York overlap stretches to five hours (12:00 to 17:00 UTC). The same happens for about a week at the turn of October and November, when London has gone back and New York has not. Any fixed table in UTC is wrong in those weeks, which is why the clock above converts each session from its own city's time with your browser's time-zone data rather than a list of dates.

The weekly open and close move with New York: 17:00 New York time is 21:00 UTC in summer and 22:00 UTC in winter.

Weekends, holidays, gold and indices

Weekends. Retail forex closes at 17:00 New York time on Friday and reopens at 17:00 on Sunday, when the Sydney session starts. Nothing trades in between, but news does not stop, so Monday's first price can differ from Friday's last. That gap can jump straight past a stop-loss, which is then filled at the first available price.

Holidays. The market does not close for most national holidays, but a holiday in a major centre thins that session out. Christmas Day and New Year's Day are effectively closed at most brokers, and the weeks between them are among the least liquid of the year, with wider spreads and occasional sharp moves. US holidays such as Thanksgiving thin the New York afternoon. Your broker publishes a holiday schedule; this clock does not model holidays.

Gold and indices. Spot gold follows the forex week at most brokers but usually stops for a short daily break around 17:00 New York time, and the busiest gold hours are London and New York. Index CFDs follow their futures, which trade nearly around the clock, while the underlying stock exchanges keep shorter cash hours (09:30 to 16:00 in New York, for example). Contract hours differ by broker, so check the specification. The academy lesson on trading hours for commodities and indices covers them in detail, and building rules around trading sessions turns this into a plan.

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