WHEN CAN YOU TRADE FOREX?

FOREX TRADING SESSIONS

 You have been learnt what forex is, why you should trade it, and who makes up the FOREX market, it’s about time you learned when you can trade.
It’s time to learn about the different FOREX trading sessions.
The FOREX market is open 24 hours a day, but it doesn’t mean it’s always active the whole day.
You can make money trading when the market moves up, and you can even make money when the market moves down.
Actually, you will have a very difficult time trying to make money when the market doesn’t move at all.
Do believe us, there will be times when the market is as still as the victims of Medusa. This lesson will help determine when are the most suitable times of the day are to trade.

FOREX Market Hours

We look at the best times to trade, before we must look at what a 24-hour day in the FOREX world looks like.
The FOREX market can be dived into four major trading sessions: the Sydney session, the Tokyo session, the London session, and Pipcrawler’s favorite time to trade, the New York session. Below are tables of the open and close times for each session:
Summer (approx. April – October)

Time Zone	EDT	GMT
Sydney Open Sydney Close	6:00 PM 3:00 AM	10:00 PM 7:00 AM
Tokyo Open Tokyo Close	7:00 PM 4:00 AM	11:00 PM 8:00 AM
London Open London Close	3:00 AM 12:00 PM	7:00 AM 4:00 PM
New York Open New York Close	8:00 AM 5:00 PM	12:00 PM < > 9:00 PM

Winter (approx. October – April)

Time Zone	EST	GMT
Sydney Open Sydney Close	4:00 PM 1:00 AM	9:00 PM 6:00 AM
Tokyo Open Tokyo Close	6:00 PM 3:00 AM	11:00 PM 8:00 AM
London Open London Close	3:00 AM 12:00 PM	8:00 AM 5:00 PM
New York Open New York Close	8:00 AM 5:00 PM	1:00 PM 10:00 PM

Actually, the open and close times are depends on local business hours. This ups and down during the months of October and April because, some countries shift to/from daylight savings time (DST). The day within each month that a country may shift to/from DST also varies from/to.


You can find that in between each FOREX trading session, there is a period of time where two sessions are open at the same time. During the summer, from 3:00-4:00 am EDT, the Tokyo session and London session overlap, and during both summer and winter from 8:00 am-12:00 pm ET, the London session and the New York session overlap.
Actually, these are the busiest times during the trading day because it requires more volume when two markets are opened at the same time. This makes sense because during those times, all the market participants are wheeling and dealing which means that more money is transferring to hands from hands.
Now, let’s look at the Sydney open and think why it shifts two hours. You’d get it Sydney’s open would only move one hour when the U.S. adjusts for standard time, but remember that when the U.S. shifts one hour back, Sydney moves forward by one hour actually (seasons are opposite in Australia). You should always keep this in mind if you ever plan to trade during that period.
Let’s look at the average pip movement of the major currency pairs during each of the FOREX trading session.

Pair	Tokyo	London	New York
EUR/USD	76	114	92
GBP/USD	92	127	99
USD/JPY	51	66	59
AUD/USD	77	83	81
AUD/JPY	98	107	103
USD/CAD	57	96	96
USD/CHF	67	102	83
EUR/JPY	102	129	107
GBP/JPY	118	151	132
EUR/GBP	78	61	47
EUR/CHF	79	109	84

In the table, you can find that the European session normally provides the most movement.

Let’s take a deeper look at each of the sessions, as well as those periods when the sessions overlap.