The Asian session. Fixed hours all year, because Japan is the only one of the four centres with no daylight saving.
| Hours | 09:00 – 18:00 Tokyo time |
|---|---|
| Time zone | JST (UTC+9), all year |
| Daylight saving | None. Japan does not observe daylight saving, so Tokyo is the one session whose hours never move. Every other session shifts around it twice a year. |
| Currencies at home here | JPY, AUD, NZD, CNY |
| Overlaps | Sydney at the start, and London for the last hour. |
Hours are the conventional business hours of the financial centre. The clock above converts them into your own time zone and follows daylight saving, so it does not go stale twice a year.
The full session clock shows all four at once with a timeline.
Tokyo is the largest Asian centre and sets the tone for the yen through the day. The Bank of Japan announces its rate decisions during these hours, and Japanese economic releases land in the morning of this session rather than during London or New York.
Japan keeps the same clock all year. London and New York do not. So the gap between Tokyo and London is nine hours in the northern winter and eight in the summer, and any strategy written as "two hours after the Tokyo close" is an hour out for half the year unless it is written in a time zone rather than in hours.
The yen above all, plus the Australian and New Zealand dollars, which trade actively while Sydney and Tokyo overlap. Chinese data is released during these hours too, and it moves the Australian dollar because of the trade relationship between the two countries.
09:00 – 18:00 Tokyo time. The clock at the top of this page converts that into whichever time zone you pick, and it accounts for daylight saving, so it stays right through the year rather than being correct for half of it.
No. Retail forex trades from Sunday 17:00 to Friday 17:00, New York time, and every session sits inside that week. On Saturday and Sunday there is no session open anywhere.
None. Japan does not observe daylight saving, so Tokyo is the one session whose hours never move. Every other session shifts around it twice a year.
JPY, AUD, NZD, CNY. Those are the currencies whose home markets and economic releases fall inside these hours, which is what makes the session relevant to them.
The session a trade was taken in is recorded in the journal, and the analytics break results down by session, so you can see which of these hours actually works for you rather than guessing.
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