MARKET DYNAMICS: THE CLOCK

Before any of the data makes sense you have to know what time it is, and in a market that no longer closes that is a harder question than it sounds.

Live Trading Sessions runs a world clock across seven time zones and a twenty four hour timeline covering eleven venues, from Tokyo and Shanghai through London and Frankfurt to the US exchanges and the futures complex. The marker moving across it is right now.

Underneath it, the four overlap windows where liquidity actually concentrates. London and New York, which the desks call NYLON, carries more than seventy percent of daily foreign exchange turnover in a four hour window. Tokyo to London is a single hour. Asia close into the European pre-open is the thinnest handoff of the day. And US pre-market, which now runs past eleven percent of total US equity volume and has overtaken post-market.

Alongside it: live venue status, a global holiday calendar, settlement cycles, and a page on what daylight saving actually does to a cross-border schedule. Unglamorous, and the reason a brief does not quote a market that is shut.