FOREX Trading Hours

FOREX Trading Hours

The Forex market is open 24 hours a day nearly 51⁄2 days a week.

It doesn’t matter if you’re working or retired, a homemaker or a student, you can find a time that works for you to get involved in the Forex market. In fact, the Forex market is usually most active early in the morning and late and night. There are many part-time traders who are able to use these varied hours of market activity to their advantage by trading when they are not at work.

The varied trading hours of the Forex market also benefit long-term investors because these investors are able to enter and exit their positions whenever the market dictates.

No Commissions

Every time you buy a stock, a bond, a mutual fund, or a home, you are paying someone somewhere a commission. In the Forex market, however, you never have to pay a commission. The price you see is the price you get. You don’t have to factor in a little extra for the broker. You simply pay the listed price. No more, no less.

Increased Leverage

The Forex market allows you to control $100,000 with as little as $1,000. This means that you can make your money work harder for you in the Forex market than it can anywhere else. Imagine. You can keep all the profits from a $100,000 trade, and all you have to do is provide 1 percent of the money.

To put this in perspective, imagine that you are a real estate investor, and you see a $300,000 home that you believe is going to increase in value. If you could use the same amount of leverage in the real estate market as you can in the Forex market, you could buy that house with only $3,000 down and a potentially interest free loan. That would be incredible. Any real estate investor in the country would do anything to get that kind of a deal, and that is exactly the opportunity you have in the Forex market.

Increased leverage is also the point that well-intentioned, but misinformed people point to when they say that investing in the Forex market is risky. Granted, this amount of leverage may seem aggressive, but the Forex market gives you the perfect antidote for the risks associated with increased leverage: guaranteed stops.

Guaranteed Stops

You have the ability in the Forex market to determine at exactly which price you would like to enter a trade and at exactly which price you would like to exit a trade—and these prices are guaranteed.

A stop, or stop-loss order, is an order you place that instructs your broker to exit your trade if the price ever drops to a certain level.

Think of a stop-loss order as a stop sign for your trade. If your trade ever reaches the stop sign—the price at which you would like to exit your trade—it immediately stops and exits so you can protect your money.

Guaranteed stops allow you to specify exactly how much you are willing to risk. Even though you are using great leverage, you still have the power to get out of a trade at any price you wish.

You can’t say that about the stock market. Sure, you can enter a stop order to take you out of a trade if the stock starts to move down, but you have no guarantee that you will get out at a certain price.

It is really the luck of the draw for stocks. Not so in the Forex market. You have guaranteed stops under normal market conditions. There are some extreme events—like the outbreak of a war or extremely unexpected economic announcements—that may cause some slippage, but we have never personally experienced this.