USD/JPY: live price, payout and trading hours

USD/JPY shows how many Japanese yen one US dollar buys. Here the dollar is the base currency, so a quote of 150.000 means 1 USD = 150 JPY, and a rising chart means the dollar is strengthening against the yen. Because a single yen is worth little, the pip on yen pairs is 0.01 rather than 0.0001, and the terminal shows three decimals.

The yen is managed by the Bank of Japan (BoJ). For many years the BoJ kept interest rates at or below zero — negative from 2016 to 2024 — which made the yen a popular funding currency: investors borrowed cheaply in yen to buy higher-yielding assets elsewhere (the carry trade). That is why the gap between US and Japanese bond yields is one of the main forces behind this pair. Japan is also a large creditor nation, and the yen tends to attract buyers when markets turn fearful.

USD/JPY is traded heavily in both the Tokyo session and the New York session. Watch Fed and BoJ meetings, US non-farm payrolls and CPI, moves in US Treasury yields and Japanese inflation data. One extra factor is official intervention: when the yen moves too fast, Japan's Ministry of Finance has stepped into the market in the past, and such days produce abrupt swings.

Sky Trade's USD/JPY OTC is a different instrument altogether — a price series generated by the server around the clock that ignores Treasury yields, the BoJ and everything else in the real market.