Market Session Hours — Sydney, Tokyo, London and New York (in ET)

The currency market has no single exchange building that opens its doors in the morning and locks them at night. It works like a relay race between four financial centers — Sydney hands the baton to Tokyo, Tokyo to London, and London to New York — which is why it runs non-stop from Sunday evening to Friday night. The problem is that half the material out there quotes session times in GMT, server time or someone's local clock, and you end up converting on your fingers every single time. This article settles it once and for all: every hour in New York time (ET) — the clock the entire ICT world thinks in — with separate tables for daylight saving and standard time, plus the answer to the question that actually matters: when is it truly worth sitting in front of the chart.

How the 24-hour forex day works

The trading week starts at one global moment: Sunday, 5:00 PM ET. Sydney wakes up first, Tokyo joins two hours later, London takes the baton in the early hours of the ET morning, and New York picks it up at 8:00 AM. When New York wraps up its day, it's already the next morning in Australia — and the cycle rolls on until Friday around 5:00 PM ET, when the market goes to sleep for the weekend.

Two practical things follow from this relay. First, the market is open 24 hours a day, 5 days a week — the only breaks are the weekend plus Christmas and New Year's Day. Second, "open" does not mean "tradeable". Liquidity and volatility are not spread evenly: there are hours when the market has fuel, and hours when it just drifts. The whole craft is knowing which is which.

Session hours in New York time — the tables

New York time is UTC-4 in summer (EDT) and UTC-5 in winter (EST). Conveniently, Europe and the US switch their clocks almost in sync, so London and New York keep fixed ET hours all year round. Only the Asian sessions drift, because Japan doesn't observe daylight saving at all, and Australia switches on the opposite rhythm (their summer is the northern winter).

US daylight saving time (mid-March – early November)

US standard time (early November – mid-March)

Notice: London and New York don't move — 3:00 AM and 8:00 AM all year long. The only exception is the transition weeks. The US switches to daylight saving on the second Sunday of March, while Europe waits until the last Sunday; they switch back on the first Sunday of November and the last Sunday of October respectively. The effect: for 2–3 weeks in March and about a week around the turn of October and November, everything European lands an hour later in ET — London opens at 4:00 AM ET and the London-based ICT time windows shift with it. The simplest safeguard: set your TradingView chart to the "New York" time zone and read the hours straight off it — you can also check the current session and phase of the day live in our NEXUS market clock widget (nexus.hornx.trading), which tracks these shifts for you.

What the four sessions are like

Sydney (6:00 PM–3:00 AM ET during US DST)

The quietest session of the week and of the day. Ranges are tight, spreads wider, and the movers are mainly the Australian and New Zealand dollar pairs — usually on RBA and RBNZ data. Unless you trade those pairs specifically, this session is mostly theoretical: it offers little that a single glance at the chart later on wouldn't catch up on.

Tokyo (8:00 PM–5:00 AM ET during US DST)

The Asian session proper. Volatility is higher than in Sydney but still moderate — the dollar usually consolidates and the action lives on the yen pairs. From the ICT perspective, what matters most is what this session leaves behind: the overnight range, i.e. the Asian Range, whose high and low become liquidity for London. You don't need to stay up through it — it's enough to mark the extremes of the overnight range before London gets going.

London (3:00 AM–12:00 PM ET)

The world's largest currency center and the session that most often sets the direction of the day. This is where most of the daily range on EUR/USD and GBP/USD gets decided, where European macro data drops and where the ECB and Bank of England speak. The first two–three hours (3:00–5:00 AM ET) are the classic window for the sweep of the overnight range and the first directional move — exactly where the ICT London killzone sits, covered in detail in our article on killzones.

New York (8:00 AM–5:00 PM ET)

The world's second-largest center and the densest macro calendar: CPI, NFP, Fed decisions. The first four hours (8:00 AM–12:00 PM ET) overlap with the tail end of London, and that's the busiest window of the entire 24 hours. At 9:30 AM ET the New York stock exchange opens, adding volume to the indices (NQ, ES), to gold — and to crypto, which trades shoulder to shoulder with the indices in these hours. After 12:00 PM, once London leaves the market, liquidity visibly sags; the back end of the NY session is more about closing positions than starting new moves.

Session overlaps — where the volatility lives

The most interesting things happen when two centers trade at the same time:

The London–NY overlap is four hours in which the world's two largest financial centers sit at their desks simultaneously. EUR/USD, GBP/USD, gold and the US indices usually make their biggest moves of the day right here. If you can only trade one window a day — this is the one. Bonus: it's a civilized time of day in the Americas, no alarm clock heroics required.

A trading day plan (all times ET)

Both key windows land in the first half of the ET day, which makes for a clean routine:

1. Before London (2:30–3:00 AM) — mark the overnight Asian range, check the macro calendar, set the bias of the day on D1/H4.
2. 3:00–5:00 AM — the London window: sweep of the overnight range and the first directional move. The best hours for EUR/USD and GBP/USD.
3. 8:00 AM–12:00 PM — the London–NY overlap: the biggest volume, US data at 8:30 AM, the stock market open at 9:30 AM. The best hours for USD pairs, indices, gold and crypto.
4. After 12:00 PM — London closes its books, volatility fades. A good moment for reviewing the day, not for new positions.
5. Overnight — the market builds the range for tomorrow. You sleep.

Don't try to trade every window at once. It's far better to master one — the London open or the overlap — and learn its rhythm by heart than to hop around the clock. And if you want to go one level deeper and see how ICT slices these sessions into precise entry windows, read the articles on killzones and on Macro Times — the minute-level algorithm windows inside the sessions.

What about crypto, since it trades 24/7?

Bitcoin has no opening bell, but it has the same participants. The institutional capital that moves BTC and ETH works to the clock of forex and the US stock exchanges — which is why, statistically, the biggest crypto moves land in the London and New York hours, while the Asian night more often builds consolidation. In practice, the tables in this article apply to crypto almost unchanged; the only difference is that the weekend isn't a break but a separate, thin market where a move is easier to get than liquidity. How the day fits together in this rhythm is what we show in the article on intraday profiles.

One final piece of advice that will save you years of frustration: it's not a missing indicator that makes you lose — it's trading the dead hours. The same setup, the same pair — at 5:00 PM ET it gives you a choppy, random mess, and at 9:00 AM ET a clean directional run. Before you change your strategy, change your hours.

FAQ

Rafał — Krypto Bez Ściemy

Trader and founder of Strefa Tradingu. He’s been breaking crypto down on YouTube for years — no hype, no signals, with a focus on market structure and risk management.

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