Trading hours and market holidays

The trading week opens when Sydney does on Monday morning and closes with New York on Friday evening. Between those points currency markets run continuously, passing from the Asian session to London and then to New York without a break — the exact times are in the table above.

Other asset classes sit inside that frame rather than matching it. Metals and energies pause briefly each day while their reference markets roll. Indices and stocks follow the exchange sessions of the markets they track, so they are closed for most of the Gulf working day and active in the afternoon and evening.

Liquidity is not spread evenly across the day. The deepest pricing in currencies comes while London and New York are both open, and that overlap is when spreads are typically tightest and orders fill closest to the requested price.

The thinnest hours are the opposite case: the window after New York closes and before Tokyo builds volume. Spreads widen there because fewer participants are quoting, and a position sized for the London overlap can behave very differently at 03:00 GST. The hours you trade are a cost decision, not just a lifestyle one.

Gulf Standard Time does not observe daylight saving. Europe and the United States do, and they change on different dates — Europe in late March and late October, the United States in early March and early November. For a few weeks each year the two are out of step with each other as well as with GST.

The practical effect is that session times on this site shift by one hour relative to the clock on your wall, twice a year, without anything changing on our side. If you trade a specific session open, check the current offset in the weeks around those dates rather than assuming last month's timing still holds.

Exchange holidays close the instruments that depend on them: a US market holiday halts US index and stock CFDs for the day even though currency markets keep trading. Currency markets themselves rarely close entirely, but liquidity thins sharply around major holidays, and thin liquidity means wider spreads and larger gaps.

The specific holiday schedule for each instrument is published in the client portal and updated ahead of each closure, because exchange calendars change year to year. Positions held through a closure carry the gap risk of whatever happens while the market is shut — the reason many traders reduce exposure before long holiday weekends.