Gulf Standard Time

A civil time zone that does not move. The United Arab Emirates and Oman share it; the other Gulf states sit one hour behind on their own fixed offset, so Riyadh, Kuwait City, Manama and Doha share a clock with each other and sit an hour behind Abu Dhabi and Muscat. Neither offset has ever changed with the seasons, which is the property that matters for reading a market from the region.

That stability inverts the usual mental model. In a centre that observes daylight saving, the local session is the fixed thing and the foreign ones move. Read from the Gulf, the local clock is the fixed thing and every foreign session moves against it twice a year, arriving an hour earlier for part of the year and an hour later for the rest. Nothing about liquidity or the behaviour of any market is implied by that movement.

One further complication belongs to the region rather than to the clock. The working week in several Gulf states does not align with the week the currency market runs on, so the calendar mismatch and the seasonal mismatch are two separate effects that can compound during the fortnights when Europe and North America change their clocks on different dates. A session time quoted in this offset is exact; a session time quoted in a foreign local clock is exact only for part of the year.