I don’t understand how a broker charges rollover fees when the FOREX market operates 24 hours a day?
The forex trading hours are as follows:
- New York - 01:00PM - 10:00PM GMT;
- Sydney - 10:00PM GMT;
- Tokyo - 00:00AM - 9:00AM GMT;
- London - 8:00AM - 05:00PM GMT
The broker you are using is working with (at least) one of the markets above. Which means you can trade currencies when that market is active.
Outside of these hours you will not be able to trade and that is when the broker will charge rollover fees for keeping your orders/positions and passing them on to the new session.
The forex market is a market in which currency is bought and sold, and we as private retail traders are not doing this.
You must not think that you have bought some currency or sold some currency when what you have actually done is bet that a particular exchange rate between two currencies agreed by the parties buying and selling those currencies will go up or down.
Some countries like to be perceived as having legally prohibited gambling and there’s a raft of reasons why they might act this way. But they haven’t, and we are all gamblers.