Trading hours
Currencies run around the clock from Sunday evening to Friday evening. Everything else follows the exchange behind it.
Everything is quoted in server time
Sessions, the daily rollover and the boundary of every daily candle are stamped in the platform's server time, not the clock on your computer. If your local time is several hours from the server, a "daily" candle will not begin at your midnight — which changes what a daily high or low on your chart actually represents. It is worth checking the server clock in MetaTrader 5 once, at the start, rather than discovering the offset later.
Daylight saving moves the market, not the clock
Europe, the United States and Australia change their clocks on different dates. For a few weeks each year the gap between a session and the server clock is an hour different from usual, so an instrument can appear to open an hour early or late without anything having changed. The market moved; the server did not.
By market
Broad session windows. Individual symbols within a market can differ, and the specification in MetaTrader 5 is authoritative.
- Forex
- 24 hours a day, Sunday evening to Friday evening (server time).
- Metals
- Nearly 24 hours a day, Sunday evening to Friday evening, with a short daily break.
- Indices
- Trading hours vary by index, broadly aligned with the underlying exchange.
- Commodities
- Trading hours vary by instrument and follow the underlying exchange.
- Shares
- Follows the listing exchange's cash session; varies by company and market holiday.
- ETFs
- Follows the listing exchange's cash session.
- Bonds
- Follows the underlying futures exchange; varies by contract and holiday calendar.
Holidays and thin liquidity
Exchange holidays close the instruments that follow that exchange, and liquidity thins around them even where a market is technically still open. Spreads widen in thin conditions, which is worth knowing before placing a position into a holiday week rather than after.
Where the exact hours are
Session times for a specific symbol, including the rollover break, are in MetaTrader 5 — right-click the symbol in Market Watch and open Specification. Those are the hours your orders are actually accepted against.