For the level of knowledge of CL that transpires through your question, I'd say Friday 5:16pm EST to Sunday 5:59pm EST.
it appear someone of your knowledge would have more to do at this our than to give useless responses. I guess all the money you are making from trading your bored. Please dont waste my time w/ more of your ................... I'd be willing to put my trades up against yours anytime.......... I'll give you 2:1 odds on equites as well
1) The market does "pick up" with the London open at ~2am(Chicago Time). 2) I prefer the NYMEX "pit hours" from 8am until 1:30pm.
Why ask a forum which is better answered by a simple time chart with a volume indicator? High Volume > Low Volume = Preferred Trading time. It isn't that much different than trading stocks [ref: preferred trading hours.] Pre-market 4:01 AM isn't the most preferential time to be trading stocks. Just as OEX, FOMC, Employment numbers, Petroleum reserve reports provide high volatility. Depending upon trading style, may or may not be considered preferential time's. Experienced trader they can be absolutely wonderful, for everyone else catastrophic.
These are the hours I typically trade it too. You can pile in on some decent trends in the hours prior to that, but the volume is so low that I usually don't feel comfortable trading that price action.
You should pull up charts of Light Crude Oil CL futures and review them for the past few months or longer...you'll be able to easily determine what is the "most active" hours. Yet, the ideal hours to trade is strategy specific. Thus, your trade signal strategies (whatever that is) may be more reliable in a LESS active time period while someone else using a different trade signal strategy may be more reliable during the most active trading periods of CL futures. Simply, you need to do some backtesting to determine when your trade strategies are more reliable or less reliable.
Volume is not a bad way to look at it, but if you are looking at "most active" I am going to assume that you are looking for the most price movement. If your software will show the Average True Range indicator, you will immediately see that every day, the ATR of the CL front month spikes between 8:30 a.m. ET and 11:30 a.m. ET. Generally, price moves 2x-4x more in that window than it does for the other 21 hours of the day.