Market sessions and when things actually move
The currency market runs continuously from Sunday evening to Friday evening, but it is not the same market all day. Liquidity arrives and leaves with the world's financial centres, and the hour you trade changes what price does far more than most beginners expect.
The four sessions
- Sydney — opens the week. Thin, wide spreads, small ranges.
- Tokyo — Asian flow; yen crosses and regional index activity dominate.
- London — the largest share of currency turnover. Ranges expand sharply.
- New York — US data, index futures, metals; drives the second half of the day.
Exact clock times shift with daylight saving in each region, so set your platform to a single reference (many traders use UTC or broker server time) and learn the pattern relative to that, not to your local clock.
The overlaps are the point
The London–New York overlap is when the most participants are active at once. Spreads are tightest, ranges are widest, and moves are most likely to continue rather than fade. The Tokyo–London overlap is the smaller sibling of the same effect.
Outside overlaps, the opposite behaviour dominates: ranges compress, breakouts fail more often, and the same strategy that worked at midday produces a string of small losses. Nothing broke — the market simply has fewer participants.
Why this matters for your results
A strategy tested across all hours mixes two different environments and reports their average, which describes neither. Splitting results by hour of day is one of the cheapest and most revealing analyses you can run on your own trade history: very often the edge lives in two or three hours and the rest is noise paying costs.
Predictable friction points
- Daily rollover. Spreads widen and swap is applied. Avoid entering right into it.
- Scheduled releases. Employment and inflation data, central bank decisions — spreads widen, slippage jumps, stops get filled far from their level.
- Session opens. The first minutes of London and New York often set the day's range extremes.
- Fridays and holidays. Liquidity leaves early; weekend gap risk starts building before the close.
How to use this
Pick the hours that match the behaviour your method needs — trend continuation wants the overlap, mean reversion often prefers quiet ranges — and simply do not trade the rest. Restricting hours is the single easiest improvement available to most people, because it costs nothing and removes trades that were never favourable.
Next: Glossary of terms →