Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Time to Trade Forex

Is there a specific time to trade forex? I found this very infomative article about Best Time to Trade Forex. Unlike share trading, the foreign exchange market is open round the clock during the 5 business days. However this doesn’t mean that the foreign exchange market is getting the same number of activities or price movements during all these days. There is a lot more activity on the currency exchange markets at certain times of a day and usually, the best times to trade are when the trades are most active.

The 2 leading trading floors for Fx trading are UK and the New York markets. Even though the Great Britain does not use the euro, a good number European countries are within 1 hour time difference from the Great Britain, as is the Swiss market. American time zones also include Canada. So between the US and UK sessions cover the largest part of the major currencies that are traded.
The United Kingdom foreign exchange center begins at 8.00 UTC and closes at 16.00 UTC. The foreign exchanges that are primarily active during this forex session are the euro (EUR), British pound (GBP) and US dollar (USD) which is involved in the majority of Fx trades.
The USA market starts at 13.00 UTC (8.00 EST) and ends at 22.00 UTC (17.00 EST). The most traded currencies during this times are USD, EUR, GBP, AUD (Australian dollar), JPY (Japanese yen) and CAD (Canadian dollar).

The nost active trading time, as you might expect, is for the period of 3 hours when these two Fx markets overlap and the trades are open in both London and USA. This period runs from 13.00 to 16.00 UTC (8.00 to 11.00 EST).

If you are a person who like to let the trades run over many days or would like to use a program like Forex Derivative it might not create too much difference to learn about the peak hours on the markets. But if you are active in day currency trading where you will open and close a trade within a few minutes, you will find a large number of opportunities coming up during the peak sessions. And it not uncommon that doing the trade by yourself during this session can beat the Forex Autopilot Software which is the most popular currency trading robot.

In case you are trading in cross rate, i.e. a forex pairs that do not involve the US$, you may have another window of time when the financial centers in the 2 countries are open for trading.
Imagine if you were forex trading in AUD/JPY you will see that trading was maximum during what is called the Asian session. The Aussie and Japanese trading hours are pretty close and on a day when trading was expected you might find some money making trades during the overlap. However, usually this is a slow moving forex session for just about all currencies.
Therefore the best session for most currency traders is during that three hour session in the early hours in the US and the afternoon in England and Europe, when the Fx trading markets are open on both sides of the Atlantic. Trading can be frantic during those hours, there is high liquidity and the currencies move far and fast. Many of the important financial news is released during this timw too, particularly toward the starting. So this window of time is the best currency exchange times if you want to get quick cash

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