Tokyo / Asian session

Tokyo is not a quiet session. It is a *selective* one. The volume is genuinely there, it is simply concentrated into a narrow set of instruments, and if you are not holding one of them you are staring at a flatline and calling it the market. ### Why JPY and AUD specifically The yen is the third most traded currency on earth. In the BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey, April 2025 turnover put the US dollar on one side of 89.2 percent of all FX trades, the euro at 28.9 percent and the yen at 16.8 percent, with the Australian dollar holding a stable share around 6 percent (shares total 200 percent because every trade has two sides) ([BIS](https://www.bis.org/statistics/rpfx25_fx.htm)). Those flows are not spread evenly across the clock. They are heaviest when the institutions that generate them are at their desks: Japanese banks, exporters and importers, Australian and Asia-Pacific funds. That is these hours. So USDJPY, the yen crosses and AUDUSD carry real two-way business in Tokyo. A European cross does not. Trading one here means trading an instrument whose actual participants are asleep, and you pay for that twice, once in the spread and again in the follow-through that never arrives. ### The one fixed window on the clock Japan does not observe daylight saving. London, New York and Sydney all shift their clocks; Tokyo never does. That makes the Tokyo window the only session whose GMT stamp is the same in January and in July, which is worth knowing when the rest of your session boxes drift out from under you twice a year. ### The Tokyo fix Banks set a "fixing" rate, used to settle FX transactions for corporate and institutional customers, at 10am Tokyo time. In their NBER working paper *Puzzles in the Forex Tokyo "Fixing"*, Takatoshi Ito and Masahiro Yamada report that customer orders at the Tokyo fix are persistently skewed toward buying foreign currency, that the skew is predictable, that price spikes around the Tokyo fixing are more frequent than around the London one, and that calendar effects show up in the pricing ([abstract](https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/22820.html)). Japanese corporate payments tend to cluster on the days of the month ending in 5 and 0, known as gotobi days, which is where that demand for foreign currency tends to concentrate. You do not need to trade the fix. You need to know it exists, because a burst of non-discretionary, price-insensitive order flow can arrive in the middle of your tidy Asian range and take out a level for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with your model. ### The handover is the real product Tokyo's closing hours run straight into the London open, and the range Tokyo spends all night building is very often the range London is built to take out. That handover, not a Tokyo entry, is what this session most reliably produces. Not a trade. A map. ### The common mistake Bringing the wrong pair, then blaming the session. Getting chopped for four hours on a cross nobody in Asia trades and concluding the market is being difficult. It is not being difficult. For that instrument, it is closed.