By David Rodriguez, Quantitative Strategist and Timothy Shea

Summary: For most forex traders, the best time of day to trade is Asian hours. European currency pairs such as EUR/USD show the best results.

In looking at the trading records of tens of thousands of FXCM clients, as well as talking with even more traders daily via webinars, email, and Twitter, it quickly becomes apparent that most individual forex traders are what are called "range traders". It also becomes apparent that many of them have trouble being successful in forex because they are trading during the wrong time of day.

Most forex traders should trade during the late US, Asian or early European trading sessions ? essentially 2 PM to 6 AM Eastern Time (New York), which is 7 PM to 11 AM UK time.

They should avoid trading during the most active times of the trading day. Why? We've seen records for thousands of traders, and we've seen what works and what doesn't. Here is a chart of the profitable trades in FXCM accounts in the 5 most popular pairs, displayed by the hour of day:

You can see that this generally correlates with the low-volatility trading hours. Traders tend to see the