Forex Trading Sessions

Now that you know 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! Though the Forex market is open 24 hours a day, it isn't active 24 hours a day.

You can make money trading as the market moves up and down, but it won't be easy making money when the market is stagnant. Before looking at the best times to trade, take a 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 the New York session. Below are tables of the open and close times for each session:

 

These charts are general times. Specific open and close times are based on local business hours. This varies during the months of October and April as some countries shift to/from daylight savings time (DST). The day within each month that a country may shift to/from DST also varies.

Take note that in between each Forex trading session, there is a short period of time where two sessions are open at the same time. During the summer, from 3:00-4:00 am EDT, the Tokyo and London Sessions overlap, and during both summer and winter from 8:00 am-12:00 pm ET, the London and the New York sessions overlap.

As you can imagine, these are the busiest times during the trading day because the volume increases when two markets are open at the same time, and more money is being transferred.

Let’s take a look at the average pip movement of the major currency pairs during each 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
NZD/USD	62	72	70
USD/CAD	57	96	96
USD/CHF	67	102	83
EUR/JPY	102	129	107

Note from this table that the European session generally has the most movement.

Take a more in-depth look at each of the session, as well as those periods when the sessions overlap.