[B]Hey, Slane[/B]
Your question isn’t daft. (Besides, daft questions are welcome here.)
To follow up on the idea of forex markets being “open” or “closed”:
[B]The forex market NEVER closes[/B]
[ul]
[li]for the biggest players, any sort of foreign-exchange transaction (including spot forex transactions) can be accomplished whenever the worldwide interbank network is up and running — which is essentially 24/7/365.
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[li] the biggest players are: sovereign-wealth funds, large hedge funds, certain ultra-high-net-worth individuals, and occasionally central banks; these players deal directly with one or more of the banks in the interbank network, by-passing the retail and institutional brokers which the rest of us depend on.
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[li] of the 100, or so, big banks which comprise the interbank network, the 10 largest are: Deutsche Bank, UBS,
[/li]Barclays Capital, Royal Bank of Scotland, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, and BNP Paribas.
[/ul]
[B]The forex market is closed TO YOU only when your broker is closed[/B]
[ul]
[li]most brokers open for the week shortly after the business day begins in New Zealand on Monday (8am Monday in New Zealand, 7pm Sunday in London, 2pm Sunday in New York), and they close for the week shortly after the business day ends in New York on Friday (5pm Friday in New York, 10pm Friday in London, 11am Saturday in New Zealand).
[/li]
[li]throughout the week, when we talk about the forex market “opening” and “closing”, what are we talking about?
[/li]
[LIST]
[li] we are really referring to the opening and closing of the normal business day in the 3 big forex-trading regions:
[/li]Asia, Europe and North America.
[li] these regions are often referred to as “sessions”; so, you will hear traders talking about trading the “Asian session” (meaning, essentially, 8am-5pm in Tokyo), or the “European session” (meaning 8am in Frankfurt - 5pm in London).
[/li]
[li] these “session” trading times are VERY approximate; consider the anomalies: New Zealand’s business day precedes Japan’s by 4 hours, and Australia’s business day precedes Japan’s by 2 hours; the U.K. is 1 hour behind the region we call “Europe” (the Central European Time zone, which includes the largest economies in Europe); and the North American business day covers, not just New York, but 4 major time zones (6, if you count Alaska and Hawaii).
[/li][/ul]
[li] the reason for treating the business day as the forex trading day is simple: most forex trading volume is generated by commercial interests — not by speculators — and these commercial interests do most of their business during daylight hours.
[/li]
[li]Any currency pair can be traded at any time of day or night, provided you have access to the market; for example, you can trade yen pairs anytime that your broker is open, regardless of what time it is in Japan.
[/li][/LIST]
[B]If you subscribe to the theory that major currency price-moves are more likely during periods of high trading-volume, then you want to consider 2 things:[/B]
[ul]
[li] major consideration: at what times of day is total forex trading volume highest? that’s the question I answered in my previous post; for example, typically, hourly forex trading volume peaks between 9am-10am New York time, every day, and all currency pairs experience a similar surge in volume at this time.
[/li]
[li] minor consideration: when is a currency’s “home market” open? — for example, some traders think that, during the Asian session, there is more action in the yen pairs than in the non-yen pairs; this is difficult to document; on the one hand, Japanese businesses are open and busy, doing business in their own currency; on the other hand, something like 75% of all international payments are transacted in U.S. dollars; putting these two facts together, we might expect brisk volume in the USD/JPY during the Asian session, but a less noticeable spike in volume in, say, the EUR/CHF.
[/li][/ul]
lol