What are the key/core day trading hours for spot fx you guys trade. I find it is totally waste of time watching the markets beyond these hours. The best moves are starting or pre-start of the moves occur in 1 hour earlier than the key hours of each sessions and probably done within 1 or 2 hours of the each regions market open hours. Rest of the hours are too slow or volatile depend on the importance of any key news or interview? For example Asia market - 1 hour earlier than Tokyo open to 1 or 2 hours max into that session.
The few hours of the day when Europe, London and New York are all open at the same time, and especially the start of the NY session. Not my experience at all. I spent a long time trying to trade Fx at that time of day (while I was doing my first degree, because it was sometimes quite difficult for me to trade during the daytime, for a while) but found liquidity and volume much too low. It's pretty easy, by watching the volumes for the corresponding futures, to see what the most liquid times are for trading spot forex.
Would tend to say 4-6am 10am-12pm, 8pm to 12am, all GMT/DST times, though sometimes moves can start towards the end of these times. It shouldn't be too hard to code a simple indicator which gives the average range of a given time period as a percentage of the average daily range, might show up some useful nuances.
Are you sure? 8.00 PM GMT? till next/new day start of at GMT hours? That is the slowest time for fx (from US mkt close till Asia open) until new day open? Can you give that in EST or CST hours?
Sorry, those were the slow times! So the better times to trade in GMT would be 12am to 4am (Asia), 6am to 10am (Europe), 12pm to 8pm (US). So in EST (5 hrs behind) the better times to trade would be 7pm to 11pm (Asia) 1am to 5am (Europe) 7am to 3pm (US) Sometimes an early move can start a bit sooner than these times, or strong move can continue some time later after these times. All strictly my opinion of course.