Forex Market Hours

May 31, 2009 - Market Hours

As you may know, forex is open 24 hours, from 17h (EST) Sunday to 17H (EST) Friday. That’s 7 hours for Sunday from 17h to 00h, 4 x 24h Monday through Thursday and 17 hours for Friday, from 00h to 17h, for a total of 120 trading hours or the equivalent of 5 days.

However, the various market centers open and close at various hours as you can see below.

This table is in EST.

Frankfurt is open from 2am to 10am.
London from 3am to 11am.
New-York from 8am to 4pm.
Sydney from 6pm to 2am.
Tokyo 7am to 3am.

In pink, I put the periods where 3 markets overlap:
From 2am to 3am: Frankfurt, Sydney, Tokyo
From 3am to 3am: Frankfurt, London, Tokyo
From 8am to 10am: Frankfurt, London, North America

In blue, you’ve got the periods when 2 markets overlap. And in green, only one market is active.

If you want to make yourself a table like this in your own time zone, simply convert your time from EST or go to this time zone converter:
http://forex.timezoneconverter.com/

Live forex quotes for over the week-end

May 31, 2009 - How to see live quotes when markets are closed

So you were in a trade Friday and were hesitating: should I close it or leave it over the week-end? You decide to keep it because it’s doing well and at 17h EST (or whatever your time zone is) the prices on your screen go dead. Markets are now closed. And you have to wait ALL THE WAY to Sunday evening to see if your decision was the right one.

Well, there’s another solution. I use this site to track price fluctuations during week-ends or whenever my broker dies for a while or whenever I need a feed on a computer where MT4 isn’t installed. They don’t have all the pairs, but they have the major ones. There are a few sites which supply after market hours quotes, but I like this one the best. It looks like this:

So even though this is Sunday afternoon at 14H36, I get to see where prices are in relation to my open trades. At Friday’s close, for instance, GBPJPY closed at 153.99 as you can see in the pic below. But now it’s up to 154.26.


There’s nothing I can do since my broker only opens in about 2 hours, but it’s nice to keep track of what happens during the week-end and if gaps are to happen, well at least you’ll be warned ahead of time.

However, don’t go buying a new car if you see the numbers in your favour during week-ends because they tend to deflate and revert back to where they closed before markets even open. Also, if they show you’re in serious negative territory, don’t go jumping off any bridge, again for the same reason. But sometimes they don’t revert !!! Whether in your favour or not. Ah, forex IS exciting !

Anyway, you now have a tool to see prices fluctuate 7/7 24/24 in case you become a forex junkie like me! Here’s the link:

http://www.forex-markets.com/quotes.htm/

nb: you need to get rid of the pop up demo thing, right click and close