Forex Market Hours - Know Which Hours Are The Best?

When it comes to forex market hours, you don’t get too many breaks.

When it comes to forex market hours, you don’t get too many breaks. It’s not like the stock market where you have a closing bell everyday at 4:00 pm EST and everybody gets to go home. 

The forex market is open and running 24 hours a day 6 days a week.  Since it’s an international market, there are no holidays, so if you are thinking of taking the 4th of July off, think again. 

But the good news is that just because the forex market is open, doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a lot of activity.  Different times in trading are regarded as more passive or active.  In fact, there are certain times in the day when the market is barely moving.

You can regard this as the “rest period“.  The point of this article is to show you when are the best hours to trade the forex market depending on your particular trading personality.

First of all, lets break down a 24 hour trading period into the three main trading sessions.  The 3 sessions are:

The Tokyo Session
The London Session
The U.S. Session

Tokyo is open from 7PM - 4AM EST
London is open from 3AM - 12PM EST
U.S. is open from 8AM - 5PM EST

So, by looking at these numbers, you can start to get a pretty good idea when the market is at its busiest and at it’s slowest.  When there are two trading sessions going on at the same time, the market has a lot of liquidity and can really move.

When there are no active trading sessions, the market tends to really slow down.

Times when the market is open across two trading sessions are 8AM-12PM EST.  Both the U.S. & London markets are open at that time. Also from 3-4AM EST, the London and Tokyo sessions are open at the same time.  Naturally, these times are the busiest.

But from 5PM-7PM EST, there are no trading sessions, and this is where the market can really slow down and stagnate.

The first hour of the London open is considered the most volatile hour of the market, on average, day in and day out. There are a lot of traders who only trade that hour, mostly scalpers.

Fridays are generally regarded as the most unpredictable.  It’s also the day of the week that usually has the biggest news like Non-Farm Payroll.  Many traders close out their positions on Thursday and get started on the weekend because they don’t want to deal with the chaos of Friday.

Sunday is usually the slowest day of the week, as many traders are slowly getting back into the groove.

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