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Below are the market hours for Forex (US/Eastern).


More info on Forex market hours at
www.forexmarkethours.com
The highest volume / most activity is found during the periods where
the markets overlap (seen below). For this reason, these
periods are generally considered the best times to trade.
- New York and London Overlap — 8:00 am to 12:00 noon ET
- Sydney / Tokyo Overlap — 7:00 pm to 2:00 am ET
- London / Tokyo Overlap — 3:00 am to 4:00am ET
The three largest markets are generally the three that are focused
on: London, New York, and Tokyo. The US market (NY) trades runs
from 8am to 4pm ET. To create a single session which spans all
three markets, use: 7pm to 4pm Sun - Fri (see below). Adjust times
to according to the time zone of your computer clock. Tokyo opens
the week on Sunday evening at 7pm ET and the week finishes at 4pm ET
Friday with the closing of the New York Market. Create that
session (Setup: Preferences: Sessions) with these times and assign it to
any Forex symbol and to any charts for which you'd like to view the full
session. You can then create more session for each individual
market and assign those to charts if you'd like to limit any chart to
one specific market. You might end up with 4 sessions named: Forex
(Full), Forex (Tokyo), Forex (London), and Forex (New York), as seen
below.

(note, the number of the session will vary for each user
and is not important. The session times/days if the important
part.)
The Forex symbol should also be setup with display format 99.99999.
Here is an example of the symbol setup for a common Forex symbol (DTN
IQFeed):

More information on DTN's Forex symbology can be found by clicking
here. Interactive Broker users, click
here.
To setup the Profile Indicator to create separate volume- or
time-based profiles for each of the three sessions, yet give full
consideration to the US session. The user would setup the Profile
Indicator as follows, setting Per 1 to 480 (minutes for the Tokyo
market, 8 hrs, 7pm to 3am ET), Per 2 to 300 (minutes for the London market,
5hrs, 3am to 8am ET), with the
remaining 480 minutes being allocated to the New York market (8 hrs, 8am
to 4pm ET). Some
users may choose to increase Period 2 (360, 420, 480, 540) to give more
hours to London/Europe market
and less to New York/US Market.

Here is an example of what those profiles will look like:

More tidbits on Forex markets:
- Spot Forex can be an attractive option for futures traders due to
small position sizes, volatility, and flexible trading hours among
other reasons.
- Price movement is not a reflection of last trade. Each
trades or tick is actually just a change in the bid or ask price (or
both). The price attached to each trade/tick in Investor/RT is
the bid price since only a bid and ask price are provided (no last
price with each tick). And each trade/tick is given a volume of
1. For this reason, volume is not a reflection of contracts
traded, but number of times bid/ask changed (which is in turn a
reflection of volatility). For this reason, volume on Forex must
be viewed differently than that of other markets. While Forex
volume is not as accurate as true volume, it still is representative
of activity at each price at within each bar and can be of value to
traders.
The
EuroFX is a currency future contract that trades on the CME Globex
exchange and has true price and volume with each trade or tick.
Other currency futures are listed to the right. The EuroFX
represents $125k Euros per contact based on a basket of spot Forex
prices. The chart below plots 30-minute bars on the EuroFX (DTN
Symbol: @EU#). Split-session volume profiles are added to the bar
pane and per-bar volume is added to the bottom pane. The
definitions for this chart can be found by clicking
here.
The DTN symbols for many of these currency futures may be found on
the DTN web site
here. |