In the forex market, a particular point in time specified by a forex dealer to stand as the end of the current trading day and the beginning of a new trading day. This is done for primarily administrative and logistical reasons, because although the forex market trades 24 hours a day, the market and its intermediaries require a specified beginning and end to each trading day in order to record trade dates and define settlement periods. 



|||For example, let's say a forex dealer specified that the daily cut-off was 5pm every day, and a trader placed two forex trades on the evening of January 1 - one at 4:50pm and another at 5:15pm. Since the daily cut-off is 5pm, the first trade would be booked as taking place on January 1, while the second would be recorded as a January 2 trade, since it took place after the daily cut-off.