Forex market hours, plus gold, energy, indices and bitcoin: when each market moves

17 instruments, the last 12 months, 2025-08 to 2026-08 — every fifteen-minute bar sorted by the hour it belongs to. The question each page answers is narrow and answerable: how far does this market usually travel in a quarter of an hour, and when.

What time does the forex market open and close?

The currency market opens Sunday 17:00 in New York and closes Friday 17:00 in New York. Between those two moments it does not stop: there is no daily bell, and the sessions named above are working hours in four cities rather than four separate markets that open and shut.

New York hours, deliberately. In UTC that boundary is 21:00 for part of the year and 22:00 for the rest, because New York changes its clocks and UTC does not.

Six of the 17 markets here differ. Bitcoin never closes and trades through the weekend, and gold keeps the currency week but breaks for about an hour a day — both measured rather than assumed. The four exchange-traded contracts — SPX500, US30, WTI and NatGas — keep neither: they follow their CME futures, which open an hour after the currency week does and shut for sixty minutes every afternoon. Whether it is open at this moment, holidays included, is its own page.

Every hour below is shown in UTC. Turn on JavaScript and the page will convert them to your own timezone.

16 of the 17 peak at the same hour, 14:00 UTC. What differs is how much the rest of the day falls away from that peak, and the instruments differ a great deal on that.

The best time to trade forex, measured

"Best" here means only one thing, and it is the one thing a price series can answer: the hours when the market actually moves. Every instrument below peaks in the same part of the day — the London and New York overlap — and what separates them is how far the rest of the day falls away from it. The column that says so is Spread, the busiest hour divided by the quietest.

Forex session times, and the busiest hour of each

Spread is the busiest hour divided by the quietest: how much of a difference the clock makes to this market. A low number is a market whose measured range is much the same whatever hour you look at; a high one has hours where the range is a small fraction of its own peak.

Units differ by instrument — pips for the currency pairs, dollars for gold and bitcoin — so the last column is not comparable across rows.

The best day of the week to trade forex

Same measurement, summed over the day instead of the hour. Each market is scored against its own weekly average, because pips and dollars do not compare — so 100% is that instrument's ordinary day, and the figure below is the average across all 17 of them.

Thu carries the most range on average and Fri the least, and Thu is the busiest day in 14 of the 17 markets. Read the size of it before the order, though: busiest weekday to quietest is 1.09×, against 1.9–5.1× from the busiest hour to the quietest in the table above. The day of the week barely moves this; the hour of the day moves it several-fold. Anyone answering "which day should I trade" with confidence is answering much the smaller question.

The clock matters most to US30, whose busiest hour runs 5.1× its quietest, and least to BTC/USD at 1.9× — across the hours of the day, BTC/USD's measured range has varied far less than US30's.

What this is for

Turnmarks marks the bar where a push stops going anywhere, on the hourly chart of each of these 17. It does not tell you to buy or sell, and it is not a signals group. Every past marker's outcome is measured and published per instrument, so the thing can be judged before it is paid for. Free plan, no card.

This atlas is the shape of a single day. For how far each market travels across a whole day, averaged by year back to 1999, see average daily range.