Whilst the Foreign Exchange market never actually closes because currency is always being exchanged no matter what the day or time, for traders looking to make money from the Forex Market, the trading market is open 5 days a week 24 hours a day with the unofficial close each day being at 5 PM New York Close time.

Before looking at the best times to trade, we must look at what a 24-hour day in the forex world looks like.

The forex market can be broken up into four major trading sessions: the Sydney session, the Tokyo session, the London session, and Pip crawler’s favorite time to trade, the New York session. 

Below is a brief overview of trading sessions that will help you make the most of the market:
 

LONDON SESSION
Opens between 8 am GMT – 5 pm GMT; EUR, GBP, USD are the most active currencies;

US SESSION
Opens between 1 pm GMT – 10 pm GMT; USD, EUR, GBP, AUD, JPY are the most active currencies;

 

ASIAN SESSION 

Opens at about 10 pm GMT on Sunday afternoon, goes into the European trading session at about 9 am GMT; not very suitable for day trading.

 

Most forex traders are more successful during the late US, Asian or early European trading sessions – essentially 2 PM to 6 AM Eastern Time (New York), which is 7 PM to 11 AM UK time.

The chart shows the profitability of traders with open positions broken down by hour of day across the five most popular currency pairs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those profitability statistics can certainly vary on a day-to-day basis, but the patterns are impressively stable over the course of the year. But how does time of day affect the average trader’s profitability?

 

You can see that periods of strong trader performance line up with low-volatility trading hours. Traders tend to see the best results during the Asian trading session, and the chart below shows that the Euro tends to move far less through this period. To see why volatility lines up so well with performance, we need to look at real trader behavior.