trade hours

if you are not a professional trader, according yo you trade style, you may have to make a desicion. For example, if you are opening and /or closing your trades in current value of a currency pair, you somehow reach the current value, evaluate it according to your strategy (or system) and apply the desicion. Using %100 automated system such as Metatrader, is out of this context of course. But for majority, this is not the case.

In this situation, you should trade in your available times. But, if you have some kind of freedom to choose your available times, which times are the best for trading? The main subject of the article.

Forex trading starts at sunday evening (in european time ) and ends at friday evening. Between this approximately 120 hours, the trading session in uninterrupted(Christmas day and such big occasions are exceptions).

So you can trade morning, noon, afternoon, evening or night. But which is the best time for trading. It would be a cliche but it depends. It depends on your trading style. You may trade using 5min charts using momentum indicators. Or you may trade using 1 hour chart for range trading.

I usually prefer momentum and trend based trading. So I should seek high volatility and volume, but not the peak times.

High volume and volatility occurs in overlapping hours of different markets:

New York 8am to 5pm EST
Tokyo 7pm to 4am EST
Sydney 5pm to 2am EST
London 3am to 12 noon EST

So, morning hours 6 am - 9 am (gmt) and afternoon (12-16 gmt) are the most critical overlapping hours. This hours are like pivot points. They indicates many things to enter a trade or closing a trade.

Big turns in trends and momentum accelerations happens in these hours generally. So if you use these hours carefully, your chance for being the correct side of the market increases dramatically.

I am using these hours in 1 hour time framed trades. I usually use morning hours to choose a side (to enter a trade) and generally close at afternoon overlapped hours.

2 systems of mine obeying these rules doing pretty well in these days. If they can prove it for a longer period, i will post them.