Forex Trading Hours, Time Zones, and Trade-Date Conventions
Summary
This note explains how to represent foreign-exchange timestamps consistently and determine when trading sessions and trade dates change. Storing timestamps in UTC is presented as a practical convention, provided local market times are converted correctly and date rules are applied separately. The institutional FX week is described as running from Monday morning in Sydney to Friday evening in New York, with the boundary expressed in each location’s local time. Because daylight-saving changes occur on different dates across regions, the UTC equivalents of those boundaries shift during the year.
For most currencies, the trade date changes at 17:00 New York time on weekdays; Sunday activity is assigned to Monday. Value dates generally follow the trade-date convention, with CAD given as an exception to the usual settlement lag. NZD and its crosses instead use a 07:00 New Zealand local-time cutoff. These are convention-based descriptions rather than a universal data-vendor specification, so implementations should verify the rules relevant to their instruments and market source.
Key ideas
- UTC is a common storage basis, but local market conventions still determine trade and value dates.
- The institutional FX week is described using local opening and closing times in Sydney and New York.
- For most currencies, the trade date rolls at 17:00 New York time on weekdays.
- NZD pairs use a different trade-date cutoff based on New Zealand local time.
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# Forex Market Timezones # Forex Market Timezones I need to store OHLC data from the Forex Market. I live in the UK which is presently in British Summer Time +1. The Forex Market EST, which is normally -5 from GMT. I'm not sure how Eastern Daylight time Affects things. I want to store the data in a format that is consistent across timezones etc and also to know when the daily trading session starts and ends. This has got me totally confused: http://www.forex-market-hours.net/ There's a two hour difference between the EST times for summer and winter and a one hour difference between the GMT times... Can anyone explain how I can store the data in a time-zone independent format and work out the session start time? ## Answer by Nonefaster (score 4) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/28275 It does not matter which timezone you store timestamps in, though most systems use UTC/GMT), as long as you make the appropriate adjustments to ensure your Trade and Value dates are correct, remembering New York, UK and New Zealand move clocks on different days and directions. More specifically: by convention, the institutional FX market operates continuously from 05.00 Sydney time on Mondays until 17.00 New York time Fridays - these are local times, e.g. NY is Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) in the NY summer and Eastern Standard Time (EST) in the NY winter (see the ACI model code https://acifma.com/model-code). Within that week, trades conducted on Sunday carry a Trade Date of Monday; thereafter the Trade Date changes at 17.00 New York time on each of Monday through Friday. So a trade conducted at 16.00 New York time Monday is considered a Monday trade; a trade two hours later at 18.00 is considered a Tuesday trade. Again these are Eastern Daylight Time in the summer and Eastern Standard Time in the winter. Value Dates (mostly two days after Trade Date, CAD being one day) work the same way. There is a single exception to that rule. New Zealand Dollar (NZD) and all its crosses change Trade and Value date at 07.00 New Zealand Time (NZDT in NZ summer, NZST in NZ winter). Hope this helps and let me know if anything is unclear! James Sinclair
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