FF & Oanda contradict FXDD, others on Tokyo session hours?

Apologies if this is wrong section. Working on a project that references FX business hours of the major exchanges; so far I've obtained 5 different sources, and there's disagreement about the Tokyo session. I've got to write something down, but I'd hate to flip a coin Anyone have the expert knowledge to solve this for me?

Forex Factory
Link: http://www.forexfactory.com/market.php
Tokyo: 00-09 UTC

FXDD
Link: http://www.fxdd.com/us/en/forex-reso...rket-sessions/
Tokyo: 23-08 UTC

Oanda
Link: http://fxtrade.oanda.com/analysis/market-hours
Tokyo: 00-09 UTC

ForexMarketHours.com
Tokyo: 23-08 UTC

Forex.TimeZoneConverter.com
Tokyo: 23-07 UTC

Tokyo doesn't use DST, so this shouldn't be too hard. I guess I could email fxcomtky AT boj.or.jp ... but I'm kinda not professional, so it'd be little awkward

IB, Alpari, FXCM, GAIN Capital, and CitiFX websites are mum.

Thanks for your time.

Maybe this article could help...

http://www.babypips.com/school/presc...-sessions.html

Sydney opens at 5:00 pm to 2:00 am EST (EDT)

Tokyo opens at 7:00 pm to 4:00 am EST (EDT)

London opens at 3:00 am to 12:00 noon EST (EDT)

New York opens at 8:00 am to 5:00 pm EST (EDT)

According to this article, Tokyo session is 23 - 8 UTC.

Converted to UTC, you are asserting Tokyo session is 23 - 8 UTC.

So, both of you are saying the Forex Factory & Oanda posted market hours are dead wrong, and FXDD is correct.

Can anyone provide a source that is, um, not renowned for asinine cartoons and headings such as "Impress Your Date With Forex Lingo" C'mon this shouldn't be too hard! Japan doesn't even observe DST.

Think of this:

Does market at timezone other than GMT open at say 09:30 GMT ? That's like assuming that every countries market follows the GMT.

If you are writing software to backtest time based trades, then you have to have historical knowledge of timezone changes and dates/times when DST went in/out of effect. Then you can answer when a particular market opened at that time. (also the market open times may have changed if backtesting decades back)

I don't know where to find when the FX market really "opens". One thing that can be done is find when the stock market opens and has "pre-market opens" and try to see if there is some relation to FX activity. (presumably if people are buying stocks they may do some FX conversions while at it)

Those times are going to be local to the stock market, so if you want the times in UTC/GMT for historical dates etc then you need the historical data. If you are using C#, NodaTime is a library that can do these lookups.


Another approach is to do statistical analysis on when volatility and volume was high - it would probably show that the times cluster and change with DST's if your reference is UTC. Yet another would be to use calendar data to see where major news releases occur in that reference (UTC). You'll probably want to do that anyway as spreads widen during such times.

Forgive me, I should have referred to UTC rather than the GMT time zone. I meant it as a standard for comparison purposes. Thanks for pointing out the distinction. Note that DST does not go in/out of effect in Japan. They don't use DST over there.

Somewhat in line with your 2nd suggestion, I did check the Japan Exchange Group website (which represents both the stock exchange and osaka exchange) but was unable to find any auxiliary hours listed. Their stock market closes at 0600 UTC, so the FX hours certainly aren't parallel.

No, thankfully my project is not backtesting. If it was, your 3rd suggestion would be great. I'm working on a paper and would rather not publish false information or information that contradicts distinguished sources without substantiation.

Edit: Tried your last suggestion (nice idea!)... but checking a couple months on the FF calendar I didn't see any JPY economic releases near 23 or 24 UTC at all, so that's a dead end.

It's a little hard to believe that the contradictions I listed in the OP could remain published across reputable websites for who-knows-how-long and nobody's noticed, cared, or corrected them? Are the operating hours of one of the top foreign exchange markets in the world so inconsequential a matter? If "everything" is automated these days, maybe the Tokyo manager just arrives at work in his PJs "sometime" between 23 - 24 UTC, and there's no consistent open time. This is a strange world....

There's really two or three separate things here:
1) the trading hours of marketplaces (eg. many of the markets have various states/phases that depend on venue)
2) times when people involved in some sort of financial activity start doing their thing resulting in predictable volatility
3) the official "open"

Then on top of the more obvious things related to trading hours, there are activies like settlement, fixing, expiries etc. And some big players may have their own scheduled activities. Or perhaps certain markets have more influence on fx than others and those markets have scheduled 'occurrings'.

So if one studies the FX charts, one will see a lot of seemingly regular patterns but they may be related to activity on other markets and if you don't understand all the markets that could effect FX with such schedules then making sense of some moves is harder. The most basic "move" is that if there is some sort of regularly scheduled thing, the market makers do not want to give tight tradable quotes at that time since market makers generally don't want to make markets when there is anything except "randomness" present. Market makers generally work on the assumption than markets are random and no one has better information than them. When they learn that there is something predictable and possibly informed participants involved, they widen spreads, stop quoting prices etc.

PS. When you see someone saying "FX market is most liquid..trillions traded" one should look is their posting history is full of what could be considered some sort of industry promotion. The reality is that trillions may be traded, but not in retail type of directional bets. And anyone who truly knows what market has most tradable liquidity is not going to tell about it when they had to probably spend lots of real money to find that out. So anyone making big claims about liquidity may have an agenda - usually in such claims it is to get people to trade that market when they believe they have the upper hand.

Interesting information. I'm having trouble understanding the distinction between 1) & 3) w.r.t. FX trading hours.

But I think you're saying (correct me if I'm wrong): although there are official "trading hours" for each venue/marketplace, the 24hr nature of the FX market means that commencement of each session's activities may depend more on drivers of those activities than on the actual local open time, and that this arrangement is highly preferable for liquidity providers. And so you're saying that I shouldn't be surprised if brokers don't agree with each other on official venue hours and exchanges don't bother to publish them.... because this irregular dynamic is actually advantageous to market makers / liquidity providers who would have dramatically more difficulty providing tight quotes (for their own self-preservation) were session open times as rigid as I've been assuming.

Is that kinda what you're saying? If that's the case, that actually helps a lot. Thanks.

Hi the 24hr market clock may help

http://market24hclock.com

cheers

LOL thx!! Behold the infallible market clock

Is it customary at FF for members to reply to a thread without reading the original post? 3/4 of you guys totally missed my argument. It's no problem, fxj's answer helped I think.

even worse.... I did read the first post ....