Trading Hours Across Markets

Forex trades nearly around the clock on weekdays because it is a decentralized, global market made up of banks and financial centers in different time zones. Trading opens with the Sydney and Tokyo sessions, hands off to London, and finishes with New York, creating a continuous 24-hour cycle from Monday morning in Asia through Friday evening in New York. Activity is not evenly spread through that window, though — liquidity and volatility are noticeably higher when major sessions overlap, particularly during the London-New York overlap, and noticeably thinner during the late Asian session.

Stocks trade only during the official hours of their listing exchange. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq are open roughly 9:30am to 4:00pm Eastern time on weekdays, with limited pre-market and after-hours sessions on either side. Outside those hours, stock CFDs or shares simply cannot be traded on that exchange, and prices gap between one day's close and the next day's open based on overnight news.

Indices generally follow the trading hours of the exchange where their underlying stocks are listed, though many brokers offer extended or near-continuous CFD trading on major indices during the week with a short daily maintenance break, so an index CFD can often be traded for longer stretches than the literal cash market it tracks.

Crypto is the outlier: it trades 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including weekends and holidays, because it has no central exchange, no listing authority, and no official opening bell — trading happens continuously across a global network of exchanges. This is also why crypto can experience sharp moves over a weekend with essentially no one "at the desk," a risk that forex and stock traders do not face in the same way since those markets simply pause.