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A few weeks ago, one of our contributing writers, John Forman, posted on when the best time of day to trade Forex was. The question was inspired by the Q&A session of our last Trade Leader webinar featuring Currensee’s Taylor Growth, who explained the benefits of using a conservative Forex trading strategy.

Recently, we were able to get some insight on this question from another Trade Leader; Gabor, Asirikuy Trading. Gabor trades using a technical strategy based on indicators such as Chart Patterns, Bollinger Band, RSI, Stochastics.

Gabor says:

“It depends on the currency pair. The rule of thumb is that the bigger the liquidity of the market, the better to trade it. Liquidity is changing during the day even for heavily traded pairs. E.g. the London session is considered to be the best time to trade the European majors (EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDCHF). Big liquidity does not necessarily mean directional price movement – we can experience the formation of congestion zones many times during liquid hours. But when balance between bulls and bears is broken during a highly liquid period, chances are that it is going to be a meaningful movement, the beginning of a trend.

To support my statement, I examined one of the short-term trend following systems that I trade at Currensee.

It’s a momentum-based strategy, which trades the H1 EURUSD. If price momentum reaches a certain threshold, the system opens a market order in the direction of the momentum. In other words, if the open/close of the hourly candle is bigger than a preset % of the daily volatility, we enter the market. I ran a simulation of 12-year price data and then grouped the market entries by hour. The result is shown on the chart.



As you can see, most entries are in the overlap of the European / US sessions which starts in the range of 1 p.m. GMT (New York) – 2 p.m GMT (Chicago). This lasts to the last hour of the London/Frankfurt session,  5 p.m. GMT. The Asian / European overlap is the second most busy period from 8 a.m to 10 a.m GMT.”

It is interesting to compare this response to that given by Trade Leader Taylor Growth. Since he is a range trader, he feels that the lower trading volume in the NY afternoon, Asian, and early-European sessions yield the highest success rates. He explained that the best time of day to trade really depends on the strategy the trader is using. Since his conservative strategy is very technical, it fares better in Asian sessions when trading European pairs. Since it’s nighttime in Europe while the Asian markets are most active, no European news releases are making their way out and influencing trades.

To see how these two Trade Leaders’ trading strategies have been working for them, check out the Leaderboard.

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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results. Investor returns may vary from Trade Leader returns based on slippage, fees, broker spreads, volatility or other market conditions.