Market sessions: when the market actually moves
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The short answer
The currency market is open non-stop from Sunday evening to Friday evening, but activity concentrates in three windows. The Asian session, roughly 01:00 to 09:00 Paris time, is the narrowest. London opens around 09:00 and brings the first real volume. New York arrives around 14:30, and the window where the two overlap, roughly 14:30 to 17:30, holds most of the day’s movement. Open does not mean active: the rest of the time you pay the same spread for far less movement.
Three windows, in Paris time
The Asian session runs approximately from 01:00 to 09:00. Ranges are small, the market often builds a narrow band, and the levels formed there hold poorly once Europe arrives. Yen, Australian dollar and New Zealand dollar pairs, on the other hand, have a real life there.
The London session opens around 09:00 and closes around 17:30. It is the most important venue in the currency market, and the day’s high or low often forms there in the first hours.
The New York session starts around 14:30 with American data, with equities opening around 15:30. Activity fades from 19:00 onwards.
⚠ These correspondences shift by an hour during the two or three weeks in spring and autumn when Europe and the United States do not change clocks on the same day.
The overlap is the only window that really counts
From roughly 14:30 to 17:30, London and New York are open at the same time. The two largest pools of liquidity in the world sit on top of each other, and that is where most of the day’s tradable movement happens.
That window has two measurable virtues: the spread is at its tightest, and moves more often run to completion. It has a symmetrical flaw: it is also when American releases land, covered on our page about the economic calendar.
SMC vocabulary often speaks of “killzones” for precise slots around the opens. The name is more impressive than the thing: it simply designates the moments when volume arrives, and no slot has magical properties.
Not every instrument keeps the same hours
Choosing your session means first knowing what you trade.
The major currency pairs live on London and New York. Yen pairs wake up in Asia. Gold and the American indices follow the dollar, so the European afternoon. European indices have their own equity opening hours.
Bitcoin is the special case: it never closes, but its volume still follows European then American office hours. Open on Saturday does not mean tradable in good conditions.
The hours when the spread costs you most
The spread is not constant, and it widens precisely when few people are there.
The most expensive moment of the day is the rollover to the next trading day, around 23:00 Paris time, when many brokers pause briefly and spreads can triple. Placing an entry or a tight stop there is a bad idea.
The other two moments to avoid are the very start of the Asian session and late Friday afternoon, when participants close their positions before the weekend and moves turn erratic.
That is a real cost, not a detail: on a short target the spread is a significant share of what you are going after.
Your session follows your horizon, not the other way round
The question “which is the best session” has no answer in the abstract, because it depends on how long you intend to stay in position.
On a short horizon the session is decisive: entering during a quiet window means paying a wide spread for a move that may never come.
On a long horizon it matters far less: a position held for days will cross every session, and the exact hour of entry does not decide the result. The subject is covered in full on our page about choosing your timeframe.
What AlphaGPT does
The analysis is about your broker’s real prices at the moment you run it, so about the state of the market at that hour and not about an average. That is what separates it from a reading made on a frozen screenshot, as our page about general-purpose AI assistants explains.
The state of the market is displayed: when an instrument is closed, it says so, and the high-impact releases of the coming hours are shown beside the analysis.
On the other hand, the tool does not pick the moment for you and will not stop you analysing a chart at six in the morning. Knowing whether the market you are looking at has already seen its volume is on you. Trading carries a risk of capital loss.