The Best Trading Times in the 24 hour Forex Market

In the Forex market as with other markets there are things that you can control and things that you cannnot. The Forex market provides the opportunity to choose what currency you wish to trade in. It enables you to choose

• to buy or sell a given currency
• the amount or volume of a given currency you wish to trade
• to make a decision when to trade.

These are all key variables that you have control of and need to be considered before trading.

Today we will look at when you can actually trade in the Forex market as it is very different to futures and equity markets. The Forex market is an open 24 hours a day 5.5 days of the week. However as I live in Australia there is no real volume on Saturdays and there are no open markets on Sundays. The reason the Forex market is a 24 hour market is that as soon as trading ceases in one geographical location it has generally already begun in another. Therefore if markets in your region are closed usually you can trade somewhere else.

The Forex market opens in New Zealand followed shortly after by Australia then Asia, Europe and America. It is very important to be aware of the times major trading countries are open. Thankfully there is an excellent tool I use and highly recommend, It is called ZoneTick. This program allows you to have multiple clocks in the taskbar or any other area on the screen for that matter.

As you can see this makes determining the time in different geographical locations very simple. There are multiple ways you can configure ZoneTick. ZoneTick allows you to add any countries you wish and keeps clocks synced. Another great feature of ZoneTick is it updates for daylight savings time which is a great feature.

ZoneTick also has another handy feature that automatically changes the background of a clock during office hours this means you can tell if a region is open simply by glancing. It also allows you to define the visual appearance of clocks.

This program is free to try and if you like it you can purchase it. The last time I looked it was US$24.99. You can download it direct or if you want to read more about it and decide weather this is a program you want you can.

Download Direct

More Information

ZoneTick is a very good program, however I think that it is important that you know the time markets open and close. Due to the globally dispersed nature of the Forex market the best way to do this is in GMT time. GMT time is used by default in MetaTrader, below is a MetaTrader screen capture that highlights the open and close time in GMT.

As you can see the image above shows the AUD/USD currency pair on September 4th 2007(A Tuesday). The range for the day was approximately 73 pips. Below highlights the range during each period:

Australian/Asian 71 pips
European 43 pips
London New York overlaps 39 pips
New York 38 pips

The Asian London overlaps on this day way fairly insignificant.

Generally in the middle of the weak (Tuesday and Wednesday) there is more movement in the major currencies. An important occurence happens on Wednesday on positions held overnight, it is called triple swap, however I will leave this for future discussion.

It is important to know the times in which currency markets are open for business and it is a very important factor in deciding to enter a trade. When I first started out I drew up a table of the opening and closing times of these markets in GMT and then wrote in the local times. This is shown below:

Download 24 Hour Forex Trading Times Table
I strongly recommend you download this chart and fill it in for your local time zone. This will help reinforce your knowledge and in no time at all you will be able to calculate in your head the times overseas markets open and closed.

About the author

Mark - Is a 28 year old form Australia. He has a Bachelor in Economics and a Major in CS. He is currently working towards his CFP. His interests include algorithmic trading systems, artificial intelligence, game theory and poker.