Here are the forex market opening and closing times for the next 5½ months.
[B]GMT opening and closing times for the 7 principal forex markets[/B]
Sunday, April 5, 2015, through Friday, September 25, 2015
Wellington (time zone = GMT+12) - opens at 2000 GMT, closes at 0500 GMT
Sydney (time zone = GMT+10) ----- opens at 2200 GMT, closes at 0700 GMT
Tokyo (time zone = GMT+9) -------- opens at 2300 GMT, closes at 0800 GMT
Singapore (time zone = GMT+8) — opens at 0000 GMT, closes at 0900 GMT
Zurich (time zone = GMT+2) ------- opens at 0600 GMT, closes at 1500 GMT
London (time zone = GMT+1) ------ opens at 0700 GMT, closes at 1600 GMT
New York (time zone = GMT-4) ---- opens at 1200 GMT, closes at 2100 GMT
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What you call the Frankfurt market, I’m calling the Zurich market in the table above. Different names for the same market.
All of central Europe, including Germany and Switzerland, and about 26 other countries, are in the same time zone — GMT+2 in the summer, and GMT+1 in the winter.
If you want to read more about seasonal time changes in the forex market, here is the thread where the table came from.
There are different opinions about the so-called “opening” time and “closing” time of every forex market, because every forex market operates 24 hours per day, and technically [I]opens and closes only once per week.[/I] So, some discretion has to be applied when specifying an arbitrary [I]daily[/I] opening and closing time for any of these markets.
The “discretion” which I use is to set the market times according to the regular business hours in the locale in question. So, the New York market, for example, “opens” at 8am New York time, and “closes” at 5pm New York time. These times are then converted to GMT times, and appear as shown in the table above.
I did a study of trading volume, hour-by-hour, in the principal forex markets, and found that on average, about 83% of all the day’s trading volume occurred in the 9-hour period from 8am to 5pm (local time) in each market, and about 17% of all the day’s trading volume occurred in the 15-hour period from 5pm to 8am the following day. Based on that, I use 8am to 5pm, local time, in each of the principal forex markets as the “opening” and “closing” times.
In one sense, asking when a particular forex market “opens” or “closes” is a little like asking when the real estate market in a particular city “opens” or “closes”. Generally, real estate is bought and sold during daytime or early evening hours. But, I once sold a property at midnight in the Washington, D.C. area. So, would you say that the real estate market in Washington is “open” until midnight? I don’t think you would.
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