Tokyo Session Forex Pairs — Quiet Hours, Not Empty Hours

By Uladzimir Leuchankou, founder of Signal2Forex · 7 November 2026

What is the Tokyo session in forex? The usual answer is short — the hours when Japan trades, from 00:00 to 09:00 GMT, with thin volume and small ranges. I suppose that is an answer too. But for me the Tokyo session is the part of the day when a few pairs do real work and the other pairs only widen their spreads.

The Tokyo session forex pairs I would watch are USD/JPY, AUD/USD, AUD/JPY and NZD/USD. Their news comes out in these hours — Japanese data, the Australian rate decision, the Tokyo fix. EUR/USD and GBP/USD mostly wait for London. This is the map, and the table below puts it on a clock.

Hours in three time zones

Japan does not change its clocks. The Tokyo session starts at 00:00 GMT in January and in July, and it ends at 09:00 GMT. This is 09:00 to 18:00 in Tokyo. Only your own clock moves.

People often ask for the Tokyo session EST hours. From November to March it is 19:00 to 04:00 in New York. In summer, when the United States is on daylight time, it is 20:00 to 05:00. London works the same way — the overlap with Tokyo is one hour in winter, from 08:00 to 09:00 GMT, and two hours in summer. I wrote about that side of the day in the London session guide.

There is one more clock inside the session. The Tokyo Stock Exchange trades from 00:00 to 02:30 GMT, stops for lunch, and trades again from 03:30 to 06:30 GMT. The afternoon part became 30 minutes longer on 5 November 2024, when the exchange moved its close to 15:30 local time — the exchange notice has the full schedule. Currency trading does not stop for lunch, but it slows down. You can see it on any H1 chart.

Tokyo and the Asian session

Is Tokyo session Asian session? Almost. The Asian session is the wider name — it covers Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong together. Japanese session, Japan session, Tokyo sessions — these are all names for the same nine hours, and the Tokyo forex market is only one desk inside them.

It is not the biggest desk. In the last BIS survey, for April 2025, Singapore handled 11.8% of world currency trading and Hong Kong 7.0%. Dealers in Japan reported about $440 billion a day — half of the $883 billion reported in Hong Kong. By my calculation this is about 3.5% of the total.

But the yen is a different story. The same survey puts the yen on one side of 16.8% of all trades — third place after the dollar and the euro. So the desk is small and the currency is large. For me this explains the session better than any list of features: Tokyo matters because of the yen, not because of the volume.

Tokyo session forex pairs

The first pair is USD/JPY. This is where Japanese importers and exporters do their business, and they do it in their own morning. When Japanese inflation data or a Bank of Japan decision comes out, USD/JPY answers first, and the yen crosses follow it within seconds.

The second group — AUD/USD and NZD/USD. If you ask about the best pairs to trade during Sydney and Tokyo session hours, these are the answer, because Australia and New Zealand publish their data between 21:45 and 03:30 GMT. Nobody in London is awake for it.

AUD/JPY sits between the two groups. It takes news from both sides, so it often has the widest range of the night. EUR/JPY and GBP/JPY follow the yen in these hours and get their own news only when Europe comes in.

What about EUR/USD? It trades, the spread is normal, and most nights nothing happens. So my list of the best pairs to trade during Tokyo session hours is short — four pairs, and on many nights only one of them has a reason to move. I would give the same four names as the best forex pairs to trade during Asian session hours in general.

Other Asian session pairs, like USD/SGD or USD/HKD, cost too much in spread on a small account. Leave them to the banks.

Two mornings in November

Most guides say the same thing about this session — low volatility and a narrow range with clear levels. I agree for many nights. I do not agree with the word always. This week gave two examples, and neither of them was narrow.

On Tuesday, 3 November 2026, at 03:30 GMT the Reserve Bank of Australia raised its cash rate to 4.85%. The vote was six to three, and the statement no longer promised more rises. AUD/USD stood near 0.7000 before the decision and fell to 0.6974 after it. This is about 25 pips in the middle of the Tokyo day — $250 on one standard lot of 100,000 units, $2.50 on 0.01 lot.

A rate rise that sounds like a pause is the hawkish vs dovish question on a live chart. The number went up and the currency went down.

On Friday, 6 November, there was no decision at all. USD/JPY fell to 157.26 early in Tokyo hours and then went back above 158.00 before London opened. This is 75 pips. At a rate of 157.90 one pip on a standard lot is worth $6.33, so the move was about $475 on one lot and $4.75 on 0.01 lot.

The chart shows full days, not Tokyo hours alone. I do not have a clean split by session for each of these days, so I will not pretend that I do. But it gives the scale. If you plan a stop for a quiet session and the session is not quiet, the stop is in the wrong place.

The fix at 00:55

There is another moment in this session that many pages describe as a strategy. At 09:55 Tokyo time, which is 00:55 GMT, Japanese banks set the dollar rate they will give their customers for the day. Companies that must buy dollars often do it through this rate. On dates that end in 5 or 0 the payments are larger, and dealers in Japan have their own name for such days.

The old version of this page called it arbitrage. I would drop that word — there is no free money in a rate that every bank in Tokyo watches. Sometimes the dollar rises into the fix and falls after it. Sometimes it does nothing. I do not know whether this pattern still pays after the spread, and I do not trade it.

What I take from the fix is simpler: the first hour in Tokyo has real orders in it. So a move before 01:00 GMT is not always noise.

Opening range breakout in Tokyo

Does ORB strategy work for Tokyo session trading? ORB means opening range breakout — you mark the high and the low of the first hour and trade the break of either side. The idea is simple, and the question is fair.

My answer has two parts. On a day with a scheduled reason — a Bank of Japan meeting or an Australian decision — the break has something behind it, as on 3 November. On an ordinary night the first hour is narrow, the price leaves the range by a few pips and comes back. So I would use the calendar as the filter for this setup.

Then there is the cost. Take a first hour of 20 pips on USD/JPY and a spread of 1.5 pips. The spread is 7.5% of the whole range before the trade starts. And a breakout order sits at the edge of the range, where two or three pips decide whether the break is real. In London the same spread sits inside a range three or four times wider.

I have not run a full backtest of this setup on the Tokyo open, so I will not give you a win rate. I can only say where the numbers look hard.

My robots at night

I am an engineer, and I look at this session through the logs of my own programs. The Forex V Portfolio is 28 advisors on 14 pairs, all on the H1 chart. The advisors do not know what a session is. They read hourly bars by server time and check the spread before each order.

This check matters most at night. After the New York close, at 22:00 GMT in winter, spreads on many pairs become several times wider for a short time, and an order sent in that hour pays for it. So the filter simply waits. The live account is on our YouTube stream all day and all night — you can open it during Tokyo hours and see what the terminal shows.

If you trade by hand in this session, you need the same rule in your head. Look at the spread first, then at the chart.

Money on a small account

One more thing — the size of the trade. How much is a Tokyo move worth to you? Take a stop of 40 pips on USD/JPY. On one standard lot this is about $253, which is 2.5% of a $10,000 account. On 0.01 lot it is $2.53 — the same 2.5% of a $100 cent account.

You need to look at the percent first. A common limit is 1% of the account for one trade. For this stop it means 0.4 lot on the large account and 0.4 cent lot on the cent account — one cent lot is 0.01 of a standard lot. The full method for these numbers is in the page about what a pip is.

Quiet hours, not empty hours

How to trade Tokyo session hours, then? For me it comes down to a short list. The clock in GMT, the Tokyo session forex pairs with their own news, the calendar for the night, the fix in the first hour, the spread before every order, the size of the trade in percent. All of this is the same work as in London, only with less room for a mistake.

The more you know about what is scheduled inside these nine hours, the steadier your trading in them will be.

Checked against: Bank for International Settlements, Triennial Survey of foreign exchange turnover, April 2025 · Reserve Bank of Australia, monetary policy decision, 3 November 2026 · Tokyo Stock Exchange, notice on trading hours, 20 September 2023. Trading currencies with leverage can lose money faster than it makes it. Nothing on this page is personal advice.