The Global Forex Market

With the Forex system available for 24 hours a day during the trading week anywhere in the world, a Forex trader has wide-ranging opportunities to trade as much or as little as they like. This can be illustrated by choosing a country for the trader to be based in, in this case the United Kingdom and with all times as Greenwich Mean Time.

The London market opens at 8am and is available for trading until 5pm. Prior to that market opening there are markets open in Australia and Japan, with the Sydney market coming online at 10pm the previous day and the Tokyo market opening up two hours later. With each market trading for nine hours a day, this means there is a market overlap between Sydney and Tokyo of seven hours and it is often when these sessions overlap that a significant amount of currency trading is done.

The UK-based trader may start work at 5am, thus catch activity in the Australasian markets for a few hours, and then be ready for the opening of the London market. This coincides with the last hour of trading in Tokyo, so the trader will be up to speed with a variety of currency fluctuations in those markets.

When the New York market opens at 1pm there is a four-hour overlap with London, but when London closes a trader still has the opportunity to trade on the New York market. With money a global commodity, the Forex system has evolved effectively to ensure trading never stops.