For Business

Markets & Instruments

Which Markets Move at Which Hours

A market moves most when the banks and exchanges of its home are open: currencies in London and New York hours and most in their overlap, an index in its home exchange's hours, crypto at every hour. This paper shows the three cities on one band of the day in the feed's own time, the euro and the Dow hour by hour through the same real Tuesday with the busy bars marked, and the Sessions tab where a platform lists each row's hours. After reading it you can convert server time to a market's home time and say, for any row you trade, which hours its bars are tall in and why.

Difficulty
Advanced
Reading time
5 min
Pages
8
Reviewed by
Saman Rahbar

This paper is locked

Read it in the browser and keep the PDF with Premium, or buy this one paper.

Buy this paper — $3Get Premium

Which hours, in five lines

A market moves most when the banks and exchanges of its home are open, because that is when its people are at their desks. Currencies move in London and New York hours, and most in the overlap of the two. An index moves in its home exchange's hours, New York 09:30 to 16:00 for the Dow. Gold and oil follow London and the New York futures afternoon. Crypto has no home, so it moves every hour, and its busy ones follow New York's day. This library's feed runs three hours ahead of UTC in summer, so 16:30 on the feed is 09:30 in New York, and every hour in this paper is the feed's.

Three cities on one band

Picture three cities waking in turn on one band of the day, on this feed's clock. Tokyo's exchange sits from 03:00 to 09:00, London's from 10:00 to 18:30, New York's from 16:30 to 23:00. The day moves west. The two hours where London and New York are both open, 16:30 to 18:30, are the busiest for currencies, because the two largest banking centres are at their desks at once. A market is busy under the city that owns it, and quiet when that city is asleep, whatever the platform's clock says.

This paper is locked

Read next