How can you trade forex while working a full-time job?

How can you trade forex while working a full-time job?

Rihari says he fit forex trading around a full-time job by matching his trading session to his work hours, doing market analysis before his shift, using price alerts instead of watching charts all day, and reserving out-of-work hours for practice, while sacrificing most of his social time for several years.

That is a description of one person's routine, told in his own words on his YouTube channel, not a system or a business model. Rihari frames it as a personal account of what worked for his schedule as a real estate agent in New Zealand with young kids at home, not as a formula that produces the same outcome for anyone who copies the hours. Nothing in the video sets out a licensing arrangement, a fee structure, a win rate, or a typical result, and this article does not add any of those either. What the video does offer is a practical breakdown of how forex market sessions line up against different work shifts, and what Rihari says he personally did in the hours before, during and after his job to keep learning and trading without watching charts all day.

He also frames the question itself as one he is asked "often," which is why he made the video: viewers wanted to know "what it was like for me, what hours I did, how I navigated around all the little things," including work and young kids. The answer he gives is scoped to his own circumstances at the time, and he says explicitly that the approach has to be personalised: "you got to make it fit around you... you got to make trading fit around your schedule." The sections below break that answer down by work schedule, by daily routine, and by the sacrifices he says the routine required, before turning to two independently verified facts about forex trading risk and market size that sit outside anything said in the video.

Which forex session fits around a 9-to-5 day job?

Rihari says that if you work a standard 9-to-5, the Asia session is out of the question because it runs during work hours, and the London session becomes the practical option since it falls in the evening in New Zealand time.

He describes the Asian trading session as overlapping almost entirely with a normal New Zealand working day, which is why he says he never traded it, "not at all," in his own words. London session, by contrast, lands after most day jobs finish. Rihari says that outside daylight saving it starts around 7:00 p.m. New Zealand time, and during daylight saving it shifts to roughly 9:00 p.m., which he calls "the best trading session for if you're in New Zealand." For someone locked into fixed daytime work hours, he says the New York session is still reachable late in the evening or overnight for those willing to stay up, but London is the session he says fits most naturally around a conventional day job in that time zone. He is describing New Zealand local time throughout; the underlying session hours are set by when the London and New York financial markets are open, so a trader in a different time zone needs to work out the equivalent local clock time rather than reusing Rihari's numbers directly.

Which session works if you are on night shift instead?

Rihari says night-shift workers are better placed to trade the New York session, since a shift finishing around 11:00 p.m. to midnight lines up with New York hours, and depending on sleep patterns they may also be able to catch the Asia session the following morning.

This is the opposite problem to the 9-to-5 case. A night-shift worker is asleep or unavailable during the exact hours Rihari says suit a day worker, but free during the hours a day worker is asleep. He is explicit that this comes at a cost elsewhere in the day: someone on that schedule, he says, is "not going to be able to trade London session," because that window collides with their working hours or the sleep they need to recover from them. The pattern he describes throughout the video is not that any one session is universally best, but that each work schedule rules some sessions out and leaves others open, and the trader has to build around whichever window their job leaves free rather than trying to force a session that clashes with work.

Rihari does not give a night-shift equivalent of his own detailed routine, since his personal experience was built around daytime work and an evening session. The night-shift guidance in the video is shorter and more general than the day-job guidance, so a night-shift worker has less specific detail to draw on from this source and needs to apply the same underlying logic, matching session hours to whatever hours the job actually leaves free, more independently.

What daily routine did Rihari use to fit trading around his job?

Rihari describes a specific sequence he followed daily: do chart analysis before work, set alerts instead of watching the screen, decide whether to act on an alert during the day, trade his chosen session after work, then spend the time after that on practice and education rather than more trading.

He is direct that this order matters and that skipping steps is "the wrong approach." The routine he lays out, in his words, breaks down as follows:

1. Learn the strategy first. Rihari says people short on time often push straight into live trading instead of study, which he calls backwards: "you don't want to do that... stay away from doing that."
2. Pick the session your work schedule allows, based on when your specific shift starts and ends, using the day-job and night-shift patterns above as a starting point rather than a fixed rule.
3. Do your market analysis before work, in the morning, since a setup identified early may not actually play out until later in the day.
4. Set price alerts on your phone so you find out when a level is hit without needing to watch charts during work hours.
5. Decide, in the moment, whether to act on an alert while at work. Rihari says this is a judgment call for the individual, not something the video prescribes: "it's up to you whether or not you're going to execute a trade whilst you're at work."
6. Trade your chosen session after your shift ends. For Rihari that was London, traded "every single day."
7. Spend the time after your session on practice and education, not more live trading, to keep building the skill.

He describes his own version of this: kids asleep by the time London session opened, an hour to ninety minutes trading it, then roughly from 8:30 p.m. New Zealand time onward put into study rather than further trades.

How do different job schedules line up against forex sessions, according to the video?

The table below sets out the pairings Rihari draws between work schedule and trading session in the video, alongside the reasoning he gives for each. It reflects New Zealand time and his own stated routine, not a universal timetable.

| Work schedule | Session Rihari says fits | His stated reasoning | |---|---|---| | Standard 9-to-5 day job | London (evening NZ time) | Asia session clashes with work hours; London falls after work, in the evening | | Night shift, finishing ~11pm–12am | New York, possibly Asia the next morning | New York session lines up with the hours right after a night shift ends; London is ruled out by work or sleep | | Flexible daytime hours (Rihari's own job as a real estate agent) | London daily, plus post-session study | Not a rigid 9-to-5, so Asia could be skipped by choice; evenings were free once kids were asleep | | Willing to stay up regardless of shift | New York session as an add-on | Rihari notes New York can be traded late by "depending if you're really wanting to get into it" and can stay awake |

Should trading start as a side hustle or aim straight for full-time?

Rihari's own view, stated plainly in the video, is that trading rarely produces "decent money" as a part-time pursuit, and that he considers full-time commitment the only realistic path to consistent results, though he is clear this is his personal opinion rather than a demonstrated rule.

He states it as a personal opinion rather than an established fact, saying a person is "very likely" not going to be "in the charts every single day" on a side-hustle schedule. His reasoning is about time in the charts and depth of learning, not about capital or product features: someone spending an hour here and there, in his view, is unlikely to build the pattern recognition he says the job requires. He allows that a side hustle approach can exist for someone who is "happy risking more to make a quick buck," but he immediately questions whether that is repeatable, asking "is that going to be consistent? No." He frames the side-hustle phase as a necessary first step for almost everyone, an unavoidable period of learning while still employed, rather than a viable permanent state if the goal is to replace a full-time income.

He also connects this back to motive: he says most people come into trading "for the money," and his response to anyone weighing how much time to give it is to ask them directly whether they want "a side hustle" or to "be full-time." If the honest answer is a side hustle, he says "all good," but he pairs that with the expectation that profitability will take longer and screen time will be inconsistent. If the answer is full-time, his stated position is that it demands sustained effort to learn the skill, not just more hours at the charts, and that "some point in your life is going to be sacrifice of what you actually want to achieve." None of this is framed in the video as a promise that full-time effort produces a full-time income; it is presented as his opinion about what part-time effort is unlikely to produce.

How much sacrifice does Rihari say it actually took?

Rihari says he gave up nearly all discretionary time and activity for a period he estimates at three to five years: no drinking, no going out, minimal golf, and evenings and weekends given over to study and screen time instead of socialising.

He describes the trade-off in stark terms: "I sacrificed everything... I wasn't going out, I wasn't hanging out with friends... I sacrificed a lot of sleep." He frames this as a deliberate bet, describing it as trading "3 to 5 years" of effort for what he calls the possibility of "40, 50 years of not working," and he says he now considers himself "basically retired" as a result of that period. These are his own characterisations of his outcome and are not verified by any source outside the video; this article repeats them as claims made in the video, not as confirmed facts, a track record, or an indication of what any other person's effort would produce. He is also candid that the payoff is not guaranteed, telling viewers to ask themselves what they are willing to give up before assuming the sacrifice will be worth it: "if you're not willing to sacrifice anything you're not going to make it at all," a statement about effort as a precondition, not a promise that effort alone determines the result.

Rihari also compares this to the more conventional path, saying most people instead choose "50 years of working for potentially like 5 years of um retirement," a comparison he uses to explain his own reasoning rather than a claim about anyone else's finances. He credits part of his discipline to a decision framework he says he applies whenever a distraction comes up: asking himself "what do I want more in the long term," and citing a line from a motivational speaker, Eric Thomas, that "success is very deliberate and intentional" and that nobody becomes successful "accidentally unless you win the lotto." He extends that into a view about compounding effort into money, saying the goal is to "use that money to make more money," which is his own framing of wealth-building, not a specific investment strategy or return figure. He also links his motivation to his upbringing, describing it as "hard growing up" in New Zealand "because of... the struggle that we have," and says trading was, for him personally, a way to try to break that cycle. That is a statement about his own background and motivation, not a claim that trading produces the same outcome for anyone else facing similar circumstances.

What does the data say about forex trading risk and market size?

Independent of anything said in the video, two verified facts frame the environment a part-time trader is operating in: most Australian retail CFD traders lose money in a given year, and the global forex market is enormous and constantly moving regardless of what one trader's schedule allows them to watch.

According to ASIC Report 828: Risky business, 68% of Australian retail CFD investors lost money in the 2024 financial year. That statistic is not about forex specifically and it is not drawn from the video; it covers CFD trading generally, in Australia, over one financial year. It is included here because it is directly relevant to anyone weighing whether a part-time trading routine, of the kind described above, is likely to be profitable: a majority of the people ASIC tracked in that category were not. Separately, the BIS 2025 Triennial Survey recorded average daily over-the-counter foreign-exchange turnover of US$9.6 trillion in April 2025, a figure that illustrates how continuous and liquid the forex market is across time zones, which is part of why sessions in Asia, London and New York each open and close at different local hours in the first place. Neither figure comes from Rihari or the video, and neither is a prediction about what will happen to any individual trading around a job.

Reading the two figures together is useful context for the question this article is answering. The BIS number explains why a session-based approach is even possible: because the market is deep and active across Asia, Europe and North America on a rolling basis, a trader working a fixed job can choose the window that suits their hours rather than needing to be present at one single moment when "the market" trades. The ASIC number is a check on how that opportunity actually plays out for most retail participants: even with a market open somewhere at almost every hour, the majority of the Australian retail CFD investors ASIC studied did not turn that access into a profit in the 2024 financial year. Fitting a session around a job schedule, in other words, solves a logistics problem; it does not, on its own, address the risk that the ASIC data describes.

Is a personal trading story the same as a business or income promise?

No. Everything Rihari describes about his own hours, sacrifices and results in the video is a first-person account of his own experience, and this article treats it that way throughout rather than restating it as advice, a guarantee, or evidence of typical outcomes for people who try the same routine.

Where the video states a fact about how forex sessions align with New Zealand time zones, that is reported as a structural detail about market hours. Where Rihari describes what he personally did, sacrificed, or believes, that is attributed to him directly, using phrases like "Rihari says" or "the video says," and is not converted into a claim about licensing, pricing, typical performance, or safety. The only claims in this article carrying outside verification are the two cited statistics from ASIC and BIS, and both are presented exactly as those sources report them, without extending them into a prediction about any reader's own trading.