Forex Market Hours Learn Forex Trading Hours At CAPEX.com

The Forex market is the world’s largest and most liquid financial market, with an estimated $5.3 trillion traded daily. At CAPEX, you can trade over 55 Forex pairs with tight spreads, including majors, minors and exotics. Before you do that, however, you need to understand Forex market hours.

You need to know when the Forex market opens and shuts, as well as when the best time to make trades is. In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about Forex market times. Let’s get to it.

Author:

Roy Connor

Last Updated on:

18/05/2023

Topic:

Trading

Low fees and commissions

All traders want to make sure they’re not paying more than they need to when it comes to trading costs, which is why at CAPEX we offer some of the tightest spreads on the market.

We offer over 50 Forex pairs, including majors, minors and exotics, and for every single pair you trade on CAPEX you can expect very competitive spreads. It’s not just Forex traders that benefit from our low fees, either. We offer tight spreads across all our CFD assets, including more than 2,000 shares as well as cryptocurrencies, commodities, indices, ETFs and bonds. We even offer zero commission on unleveraged fractional share trades!

High quality trading tools

Any Forex trader will tell you that the only way to taste success in the financial markets is by being equipped with the right tools. That’s why at CAPEX, we’ve made it our mission to provide you with everything you need to trade Forex and execute your strategies.

Our high quality platform offers a fantastic selection of tools, including various price chart types, time frames, technical indicators and analytical tools, as well as a range of execution modes and order types. You can even use up to ten charts simultaneously when you trade Forex with CAPEX. We also offer trading through MT5.

Understanding Forex market hours

Forex is an over-the-counter product, meaning there’s no central physical exchange where currencies can be traded. This is unlike shares, for example, which are traded on stock exchanges.

How is Forex trading conducted?

Instead of being traded on an exchange, the Forex market follows an interbank market model. In this system, large banks act as market makers and offer their own prices. Forex trading is conducted between participants in markets across the globe, by phone and electronic communication networks.

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24 hour trading

The fact that Forex trading takes place across different time zones and a network of computers, rather than being tied to an exchange, enables it to open for 24 hours a day. For example, when you hear the pound ‘closed’ at a certain rate, it just means it finished trading in London – it’s still being traded in other parts of the world.

The Forex market is open 24 hours a day across different parts of the world, from 5pm EST on Sunday through to 4pm EST on Friday. Due to varying international time zones, there is always at least one market open, meaning you can trade at any time of day or night. As the Forex market is so huge, there are always traders making and meeting currency demands around the world.

Major Forex sessions

The major Forex trading sessions take place in Sydney (the Australasia session), Tokyo (the Asian session), London (the European session), and New York (the North American session). However, the market historically has three peak sessions – the Asian, European and North American. Traders often focus on one of the particular sessions, rather than trading throughout an entire day.

Award winning broker

We don’t want you to think we’re just blowing our own trumpet, and in fact we’ve picked up numerous awards for our Forex services over the last few years. For example, BrokerCheck has named us the Forex broker with Best Trading Tools. We also have loads of educational resources to help traders get to grips with things. Our training resources helped us win the Best Forex Educational Broker title at the 2020 Forex Expo awards, so we’re the perfect place for new traders as well as experienced ones.

When do different Forex markets open and close?

The opening times for the four major Forex markets are based on local business hours. The Sydney session opens at 5pm EST and closes at 2am EST, the Asian session opens at 7pm EST and closes at 4am EST, the London session opens at 3am EST and shuts at 12am EST, and the North American session opens at 8am EST and shuts at 5pm EST.

How do Forex sessions differ?

The particulars of each Forex session have an influence on how the market moves at that time. Roughly a fifth of all Forex transactions occur during the Tokyo session and it often sees more movement in currency pairs that contain the yen. It also typically sees a lot of trading of Asian Pacific currency pairs, such as AUS/USD.

The London session is even bigger than the Asian and is estimated to account for around 35% of all transactions. This session is highly volatile, and is regarded as one of the best sessions to trade major currency pairs like EUR/GBP. This is because, as well as the volatility, the London session typically sees lower spreads due to the increased trading volume.

The New York session usually sees high liquidity at its opening due to the overlap with the London session, although movement typically slows down towards the end of the session.

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