Markets · Forex
Majors and cross rates, live
Live cross rates for the eight majors, a currency strength map, and the session clock that explains why the same pair behaves differently at 03:00 and 14:00 UTC.
Read any pair off one grid
Row currency against column currency: one unit of the row buys this many units of the column. Every cell is a live quote, so a cross like EUR/AUD carries the same rate a dealing screen would show you.
Rates are indicative interbank mid prices for reference, not dealable quotes — your broker adds a spread, and the fill you get depends on size and time of day.
Which leg is actually moving
A pair only tells you about the difference between two currencies. The heat map ranks each major against all the others, which is how you tell a euro rally from a dollar sell-off.
EUR/USD, the benchmark pair
Roughly a fifth of global spot turnover prints in this one pair, which is why it sets the tone for the rest of the board. Switch the interval, add indicators, or change the symbol to any cross on the grid.
One market, four shifts
Spot FX trades continuously from the Sydney open on Monday to the New York close on Friday, but liquidity arrives and leaves in waves. All windows below are UTC.
- Sydney22:00 – 07:00 UTC · 08:00 – 17:00 AEST
Opens the week. Thin books, so Monday gaps in AUD and NZD fill here first.
- Tokyo00:00 – 09:00 UTC · 09:00 – 18:00 JST
Yen crosses and the Asian fix. Ranges are tight until the 08:00 UTC handover.
- London07:00 – 16:00 UTC · 08:00 – 17:00 BST
The deepest single session — roughly two of every five spot tickets print here.
- New York12:00 – 21:00 UTC · 08:00 – 17:00 EDT
US data lands at 12:30 UTC; the 15:00 UTC options cut adds a second burst.
The overlap does the work. London and New York are both open from 12:00 to 16:00 UTC — the window where spreads are tightest, depth is deepest and most US data lands. Tokyo hands over to London between 07:00 and 09:00 UTC, which is where European breakout systems tend to get their signal. Windows shift by an hour when the northern hemisphere leaves summer time, and Sydney moves the other way.
Pips, lots and the cost of crossing the spread
FX position sizing is arithmetic, not intuition. Four things worth having exactly right before you automate anything.
What a pip actually is
A pip is the fourth decimal place on most pairs — 0.0001 — and the second decimal on anything quoted against the yen, where 0.01 does the same job. Brokers show a fifth digit, the pipette, worth a tenth of a pip.
What a pip is worth
On a standard 100,000-unit lot of EUR/USD, one pip is $10; a mini lot is $1 and a micro lot is 10 cents. Where the dollar is the base rather than the quote, divide by the rate — one pip of USD/JPY on a standard lot is 1,000 yen, so its dollar value moves with the rate on the board above.
Spread is your first loss
The spread is ask minus bid, and you pay it the moment you enter. A 0.6-pip EUR/USD spread on ten standard lots is $60 before the market has moved a tick — which is why intraday systems have to be tested with realistic transaction costs, not mid prices.
Spreads move with liquidity
The tightest quotes appear in the 12:00–16:00 UTC overlap, when London and New York are both live. The same pair can trade several times wider around the 21:00 UTC rollover or into a central-bank decision — model that widening or your backtest will flatter you.
AlgoBeam backtests FX with a configurable spread and a session filter, so a strategy that only works on mid prices in the Tokyo lunch hour fails honestly instead of quietly.
How the backtester models costReady when you are
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