The forex market hours extend from Monday morning in Sydney, Australia to Friday afternoon in New York. During that time the market is open somewhere around the globe at all hours of the day or night.
However, it is not a 24/7 market because it does shut down on weekends. 24/5 would be more appropriate.
If you need to know the specific times that the markets open and close, you have to take time zones into account. It is very uncomplicated when expressed in UTC. This is Universal Coordinated Time, formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time. This is the standard (winter) time in Greenwich, London which is the point of zero longitude on the globe.
New York is 5 hours behind the UK so the worldwide foreign exchange market opens and closes at 5 pm Sunday/Friday in New York, 14.00 on the US west coast, 11 pm in Germany, 8.00 Monday/Saturday in Sydney.
Things get a little more difficult if you try to take summer time daylight saving into account. This makes one hour difference in countries that adopt it. But daylight saving works in a different way in the southern half of the globe countries such as Australia which have summer season from September to March instead of March to September.
The hours of the various main national markets are as follows:
Sydney: 10.00 pm to 7.00 am UTC
Tokyo: 12.00 midnight to 9.00 am UTC
London: 8.00 am to 5.00 pm UTC
New York: 1 pm to 10 pm UTC
Or we can state that in EST (Eastern US time):
Sydney: 5 pm to 2 am EST
Tokyo: 7.00 pm to 4.00 am EST
London: 3 am to 12 noon EST
New York: 8.00 am to 5.00 pm EST
You can see that these are equivalent to 24 hour cover.
Even so, this does not necessarily imply that trading will be reliable at all of these times. Just after a main market opens, the rates may be extremely fast-moving and erratic. Many traders will remain on the sidelines of the forex market for up to an hour four times a day when the currency markets are waking up in these major cities.
The US dollar is the most traded currency by a long way, involved in 2.5 times as many trades as its next rival, the euro. This means that events in the USA have a larger influence on the forex markets than news from other countries. The New York market tends to weaken around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are invested in a US dollar pair, this could be a good time to stop trading for the day.
So theoretically you can trade 24 hours a day from Sunday night to Friday night. Automated software in the form of a forex robot can even make this physically possible. Still, a cautious trader will choose his times and will not be invested during all of the currency exchange market hours. Moreover, trusting hard-earned capital on a robot is a risk most people are not willing to take. A much better idea is using
forex signals. With reliable forex signals you can improve your risk profile substantially. There are many forex signal service providers online, but always check out the track record, and test the signals on a demo, prior to starting to trade with real money.