The forex market is open 24 hours a day, five days a week, and that's the first thing beginners learn and the first thing that misleads them. It's open, but it isn't equally alive. Liquidity, spreads and volatility follow the business day around the globe, and a strategy that works at 14:00 UTC can quietly bleed money at 03:00 UTC on the same pair.
Here are the sessions, in UTC so you can convert them once and stop guessing.
Forex market hours in UTC
Times shift by an hour with daylight saving (more on that below). These are the usual ranges:
| Session | Main centre | Hours (UTC, northern winter) | Hours (UTC, northern summer) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sydney | Sydney | 20:00 – 05:00 | 21:00 – 06:00 |
| Tokyo | Tokyo | 00:00 – 09:00 | 00:00 – 09:00 |
| London | London | 08:00 – 17:00 | 07:00 – 16:00 |
| New York | New York | 13:00 – 22:00 | 12:00 – 21:00 |
The trading week opens at 5 p.m. New York time on Sunday (21:00 or 22:00 UTC, depending on US daylight saving), as Monday morning begins in Sydney, and closes at 5 p.m. New York time on Friday. That same 5 p.m. New York moment, every weekday, is rollover: the daily cut-off where swaps are charged and many brokers briefly widen spreads.
Japan doesn't observe daylight saving, so Tokyo's UTC hours don't move. Australia does, but in the opposite half of the year to Europe and the US, which is why Sydney's hours move the other way in the table.
The overlaps are where the volume is
Sessions overlap, and the overlaps are the busiest hours of the day:
- London / New York (roughly 12:00–16:00 UTC in summer, 13:00–17:00 in winter). The deepest liquidity of the day. London is the largest FX centre in the world by turnover and New York is second, so for those four hours the two biggest pools of liquidity are open at once. EURUSD, GBPUSD and gold usually make most of their daily range here, and US economic data lands at 12:30 or 13:30 UTC, right inside it.
- Tokyo / London (around 07:00–09:00 UTC). A shorter overlap. The London open often sets the tone for the European day and can break the range built overnight in Asia.
- Sydney / Tokyo (around 00:00–06:00 UTC). Quieter. The yen and Aussie and Kiwi crosses are most active; the euro and pound mostly drift.
So what is the best time to trade forex?
The honest answer is "when your pair is liquid and your strategy has an edge", and those are two different questions.
When is your pair liquid? When its home markets are open:
- EUR, GBP, CHF pairs: London, and especially the London/New York overlap.
- USD pairs: New York, and the overlap.
- JPY, AUD, NZD pairs: Tokyo and Sydney, plus the overlap with London for crosses like EURJPY or GBPJPY.
- Gold (XAUUSD): London and New York; the overlap is the main event.
Liquid hours mean tighter spreads and less slippage, which lowers your cost per trade before strategy enters into it at all. Trading EURUSD in the middle of the Asian session isn't forbidden, but you're paying a wider spread for smaller moves.
When does your strategy have an edge? This one you can't look up. A breakout strategy usually wants the London open or the overlap, when ranges break. A range strategy often does better in the quieter Asian session, when they hold. A news trader lives in the 30 minutes around scheduled releases. The only way to know which yours is, is to look at your own results by session.
The daylight saving trap
The UK and Europe change clocks on the last Sundays of March and October. The US changes on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November. For a few weeks each spring and autumn the gap between London and New York is four hours instead of five, the overlap is an hour longer, and US data arrives an hour "earlier" for Europeans.
If you have a strategy coded to trade "the London open at 08:00", decide whether you mean 08:00 London time (which moves in UTC) or 08:00 UTC (which doesn't). Your broker's server clock adds a third option: many brokers run their MT5 server on a timezone chosen so the daily candle closes at New York 5 p.m., which shifts with US daylight saving. The server time post untangles that, and it's worth reading before you hard-code any session time.
Weekends, holidays and the thin hours
- Friday evening and Sunday open are the thinnest hours of the week. Spreads at the Sunday open can be several times their weekday norm, and weekend news creates gaps: price opens far from Friday's close and stops fill at the first available price.
- Bank holidays in London or New York thin out their sessions even though the market stays open. Christmas to New Year is the classic quiet stretch.
- Rollover (5 p.m. New York) briefly widens spreads almost everywhere. A tight stop sitting there can be hit by the spread alone; the spread post shows how to check how wide it gets on your account.
Find your own best session from your trades
Every trader has a version of "I do great in the morning and give it back in the afternoon", and most never check. Your trade history can answer it. Group closed trades by the UTC hour they opened in, and add up net profit per session.
If your account is connected to MetaKit, the
performance endpoint already
does this. session_heat breaks net profit down by weekday and session:
curl -s "https://api.metakit.cloud/v1/accounts/2/performance?range=6m" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $METAKIT_KEY" | jq '.session_heat'[
{ "weekday": "Mon", "net": { "Asia": -310.4, "London": 820.2, "New York": 1450.9 } },
{ "weekday": "Tue", "net": { "Asia": -95.0, "London": 1210.6, "New York": 640.3 } }
]Sessions here are bucketed by the hour a position opened, as the terminal
reports it: before 07:00 is Asia, 07:00 to 13:00 London, after that New York.
That hour is the broker's server clock, which on most brokers runs two or
three hours ahead of UTC, so the buckets sit a little earlier in real time than
their names suggest (the server time post
shows how to find your broker's offset). It's a deliberate simplification that
also ignores DST and puts the whole overlap under New York, but it's
consistent, which is what matters when you compare one period with the next. The same payload has by_weekday and by_hold_time, so you can see
whether your losing session is also where you hold trades longest.
A pattern like the one above, losing in Asia on every weekday and winning in London, is the most common result and the most actionable one: the fix is not a new indicator, it's not trading those hours.
Quick reference
- Most liquid: the London / New York overlap.
- Quietest: late New York to the Sydney open, and Friday evening.
- Trade a pair when its home markets are open.
- Watch rollover at 5 p.m. New York and the DST weeks in March and October/November.
- Measure your own results by session before deciding when to trade.
When you know your best hours, the next lever is how much you risk in them: risk-reward and break-even win rate is the place to start.