24 Hour Market?

"At 5 PM EST Sunday, trading begins as markets open in Sydney. At 7 pm the Tokyo market opens. At 3 AM the London market opens. Finally, New York opens at 8 AM and closes at 4 pm [B](i’m guessing on Friday? My second guess is that it is speaking in terms of the same day in which New York closes at 4 pm and Sydney opens at 5 pm.)

Before New York closes, Sydney is back open = 24 hour market[/B]"

I am confused.

  • Given my two guesses, I do not know which perspective I should be looking from.
  • If this is from the perspective of a single day, does this basically mean that it is a revolving market excluding the hour between 4 and 5 pm?
  • Given all of this information does it mean that the market is open from Sunday-Friday or is this the wrong 5 day spread?

Edit: If there is some place where these questions are answered in a simple format direct me there, this is all for clarification. Also, if I’m using any terms out of place, correct me.

What time the day starts depends on where you live. FX is traded globally and the opening/closing times are only the times the markets in Asia/Europe/London/New York are physically open/closed. Individual traders in each of those places can work whatever hours they want to. The market does not close between 4 and 5.

Hello, and welcome to this forum.

Here are some thoughts on “opening” and “closing” times in the forex market.

I used to be intent on figuring out exactly when each forex market around the world opens and closes. A waste of time, I now believe, because the broader currency market — the real currency market, comprised of the mega-banks in the interbank network, where currencies are actually traded — never closes. It’s only the [I]retail forex brokers[/I] around the world who close for business sometime on Friday afternoon (New York time), and reopen sometime on Monday morning (New Zealand time).

The reason that retail forex brokers close over the weekend is simply because, generally, [I]commercial activity[/I] in the currency market slows to a crawl over the weekend, and [I]those few retail customers[/I] who might want to trade at that time cannot generate profits for the brokers sufficient to justify weekend trading hours.

Apart from the opening and closing imposed on you, the retail customer, by your retail forex broker, there is no opening or closing of any forex market, anywhere in the world.

The fact is that [I]trading volume[/I] [I]ebbs and flows[/I] during each 24-hour period, in every market in the world, but those markets don’t open or close.

Instead of defining forex trading sessions according to the normal business hours in Tokyo, or London, or wherever, I think it’s more logical to define trading sessions according to those ebbs and flows in trading volume.

If you’re interested in examining this approach, you can read about it in THIS THREAD.

Here’s a graphic showing the 4 trading sessions which occur each day, between 5 pm Sunday (New York time) and 5 pm Friday (New York time), based on trading volume. This graphic is not depicting trading activity just in New York. Rather, this is worldwide trading activity. The times shown along the x-axis are GMT, and can be converted to local times in any time zone.

For example, if you are focused on local time in the New York time zone (EST=GMT-5), then the times along the x-axis (from left to right) would be 5 pm, 2 am, 7 am, 12 noon, and 5 pm (New York times).

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It is continuous market, you can divide them in sessions of time frame but it runs non stop from Sunday morning to Friday night excluding any holidays in between.

Yeah, its true Forex market is open for 24 hours! But that doesn’t mean; good entry points are available here and there! And you can open a trade so easily! Basically, 1st of all, traders need to analysis on their trading personally; which trading is suitable for you and which trading session! Trading without a proper plan is horrible!

Trading sessions overlap each other according to time zones. That’s why there are no interruptions between them.

Not only does that make no logical sense at all, but it’s also [U]untrue[/U]: there [I]are[/I] gaps between the major sessions. Try trading an hour before the Asian session opens and see whether there’s a “trading session” in progress! :58:

It fills me with dismay, day after day, that a “verified analyst” is posting stuff like this here: aspiring traders are going to read this stuff and assume “It must be true: I read it at Babypips and posted by a Verified Analyst”. It’s [B][U]so[/U][/B] counterproductive to the value and purpose of the forum.