Equity index futures such as the E-mini S&P 500 (ES) and E-mini Nasdaq-100 (NQ) trade almost around the clock. CME Globex runs from Sunday 6:00 p.m. ET to Friday 5:00 p.m. ET, with a one-hour maintenance halt each weekday from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. ET. That is 5:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Central Time if you think in Chicago hours. Being open is not the same as being worth trading, though, so this guide covers both: when the market is open, and which of those hours deserve your attention.
TL;DR
- Most CME equity index futures trade Sunday 6:00 p.m. ET through Friday 5:00 p.m. ET, with a daily halt from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. ET.
- Open does not mean liquid. Overnight trading is thinner than the U.S. daytime session, so slippage and wider spreads are more likely.
- Most index futures day traders focus on the hours around the U.S. stock market's 9:30 a.m. ET open and the afternoon into the 4:00 p.m. ET cash close. Other products, such as metals, currencies and grains, have their own busy windows.
- Holidays change the schedule. Check CME Group's published calendar before each holiday week.
- If you automate, build the session window into your strategy so it trades the hours you chose, not the hours you happened to be awake.
Table of Contents
- The weekly schedule at a glance
- What each part of the day is for
- The daily halt and the 6:00 p.m. reopen
- Best times to trade futures
- Holidays and early closes
- Tick charts or minute charts: which suits the hours you trade?
- What we think about trading hours
- Using your hours with automation
- Try a session-based strategy in simulation
- Tax note for futures traders
- FAQ
- Sources
The weekly schedule at a glance
The futures week starts Sunday evening and ends Friday afternoon. All times below are Eastern Time, with Central Time in brackets because CME publishes its specifications in CT.
| Event | Eastern Time | Central Time |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly open | Sunday 6:00 p.m. | Sunday 5:00 p.m. |
| Daily maintenance halt | 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. | 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. |
| Weekly close | Friday 5:00 p.m. | Friday 4:00 p.m. |
CME's own E-mini S&P 500 overview describes the contract as trading Sunday through Friday, 5 p.m. to 4 p.m. CT, and the E-mini Nasdaq-100 specifications list the same Globex window with a daily maintenance period. Charles Schwab's futures overview also describes futures as open overnight, when regular equity markets are closed.
In practice, that means "Monday's session" begins Sunday at 6:00 p.m. ET and ends Monday at 5:00 p.m. ET. A trading day straddles two calendar dates, which matters when you read daily statistics or write a strategy that resets at a specific time.
What each part of the day is for
The clock is the same for ES and NQ all day. The behavior of the market is not. Think of the 23 hours as four distinct environments.
Overnight and Asia/Europe hours (6:00 p.m. to about 8:00 a.m. ET)
This is the extended session. The market is open and orders match, but fewer participants are present. FINRA's guidance on extended-hours trading warns retail traders that liquidity is thinner outside regular hours, which makes slippage and inferior prices easier to run into. FINRA writes about stocks, but the same logic applies to overnight futures: fewer orders in the book means each order moves price more.
Overnight trading is not off limits. Some traders use it deliberately, for instance to react to overseas news. But a stop-loss or limit order that is fine at 10:00 a.m. can behave quite differently at 3:00 a.m., and your position size should reflect that.
The pre-open and the U.S. morning (about 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. ET)
Economic data releases often land in the early morning, and the U.S. stock market opens at 9:30 a.m. ET. Regular trading hours for listed stocks, as FINRA notes, run from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. ET. Index futures react to the same flow, so the first couple of hours after the cash open are typically the most active and fastest-moving part of the day. Faster also means riskier: wide candles, quick reversals and stops that get tested.
The midday lull (roughly 11:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. ET)
Activity usually fades around lunchtime in New York. Moves become smaller and choppier. Many discretionary traders step away here, and that is a reasonable decision: fewer opportunities and more false signals are a poor combination.
The afternoon and the close (about 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. ET)
Participation tends to pick back up into the 4:00 p.m. ET stock market close, then drops sharply. Between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. ET, futures keep trading while the stock market is shut, and then the daily halt begins at 5:00 p.m. ET.
These windows are rules of thumb drawn from how U.S. equity markets behave, not guarantees. Volume shifts around news, quarterly expirations and holidays, so look at your own contract's volume profile before you commit to a window.
The daily halt and the 6:00 p.m. reopen
From 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. ET each weekday, CME Globex pauses for maintenance, as CME's trading hours page states. No orders match during that hour. Two practical consequences:
- Gaps at the reopen. News that arrives during the halt can show up as a price gap when trading resumes at 6:00 p.m. ET. A stop that sat inside a gap can fill far from where you placed it.
- Positions held through the halt. If you carry a position across the break, you are exposed to that gap. Many day traders simply flatten before 5:00 p.m. ET for exactly this reason.
If you run an automated strategy, decide explicitly what it should do at 4:55 p.m. ET: exit, hold, or stop taking new entries. A strategy with no end-of-session rule will make that decision for you, usually at the worst time.
Best times to trade futures
There is no single best hour, because it depends on the contract and your style.
- Equity index futures (ES, NQ): the stretch after the 9:30 a.m. ET stock open is the most popular window, followed by the afternoon into the 4:00 p.m. ET close.
- Crude oil, metals and currencies: these respond to overseas sessions and economic data as well, so their busiest periods often start earlier than the stock market's open, around the overlap of European and U.S. hours.
- Agricultural futures: these follow their own calendar, including government crop reports.
To find your window, open a volume or time-of-day chart for the contract you trade and look at when the average bar is largest and the spread smallest. Then pick one or two windows and stay inside them. A trader who tries to cover all 23 hours usually ends up trading the worst ones.
A simple way to choose
- Pick the contract you know best.
- Mark the hours when you can be at your screen, or when your automation can run.
- Overlay those hours with the contract's active periods.
- Test the overlap in simulation for a few weeks before you risk money.
Holidays and early closes
Globex does not follow a single rule on holidays. Some days are full closures, some have early closes, and some trade a modified schedule with a different halt. CME publishes the official calendars on its Holiday and Trading Hours page. Check it in the week before any U.S. holiday, and especially before Thanksgiving and the end-of-year holidays, when volume is also thin even when the market is open.
If you automate, update your session settings for those weeks or pause the strategy. A schedule written for a normal Tuesday does not know it is Thanksgiving.
Tick charts or minute charts: which suits the hours you trade?
The difference matters more than most beginners expect, and it connects directly to trading hours.
- Minute charts draw one bar per fixed time interval. During the midday lull or overnight, bars still form, but many contain little activity. Signals on those bars can be noise.
- Tick charts draw a new bar after a fixed number of trades. In busy periods, bars form quickly. In quiet periods, they form slowly. The chart adapts to activity instead of the clock.
Many day traders like tick charts because a bar always represents the same amount of trading. Others prefer minute charts because they line up with scheduled events and are easier to compare across days. Neither is correct for everyone. What matters is that you test the same chart type you plan to trade, because a strategy tuned on 5-minute bars will not behave the same on a 1,000-tick chart.
What we think about trading hours
We build automated strategies for NinjaTrader 8 and TradingView, and the most common problem we see is not a bad entry. It is a good strategy running at the wrong time.
Human traders get tired, distracted and impatient. A strategy that was designed around a specific session will often be at its best in that session and unremarkable outside it. That is why our approach is session-specific: The Philosophers pairs morning reversal with afternoon continuation techniques on NQ and ES, and Hunter4PMBreak is built around the 4 p.m. session break. Each strategy has user-configurable session windows, trade exits and position sizing, so you decide when it is allowed to trade.
Our advice is plain. Choose your hours first, then choose your strategy. Then run it in simulation across that window long enough to see how it handles the open, the lull, the close and the occasional gap. We publish backtesting results so you can compare what you see in simulation with what the strategy did historically, and our Backtest Reproduction Helper lets you check a result yourself instead of taking our word for it.
If you are not sure why automation helps with hours discipline, our guide to automating futures trading explains how we think about it.
— charlie
Using your hours with automation
A few settings are worth setting deliberately in any automated futures strategy:
- Session start and end. Define the window in exchange time and check it against Eastern Time, especially if your computer is set to a different zone.
- Flat-by time. Choose a time before the 5:00 p.m. ET halt when the strategy exits everything.
- Position size. Size down in thinner hours. Our free position size calculator and margin calculator help you check the numbers before you trade.
- Daylight saving changes. U.S. clocks change twice a year, and not every country changes on the same date. If you trade from outside the U.S., re-check the local equivalent of the 9:30 a.m. ET open around those weeks.
A reminder on risk: futures trading carries substantial risk of loss, and backtested or simulated results do not guarantee future performance. Start in simulation, and talk to a licensed professional about your own situation before trading real money.
Try a session-based strategy in simulation
All HuntersAlgo strategies and indicators come in one subscription. You start with a 3-day trial before billing begins, and the pricing page lists the plans: $49.99 per month, $120 per quarter or $420 per year, plus a 6-month option. Browse the strategy library to find one that fits the hours you actually trade, and run it in simulation first.
Tax note for futures traders
Most futures contracts qualify for the 60/40 tax treatment in the U.S., where 60% of gains are treated as long-term and 40% as short-term. Security futures, which are futures on individual stocks, are different. FINRA's disclosure statement states that they do not get the standard futures treatment. That same document also notes that exchanges trading security futures may open and close at different times from each other and from the underlying stock market. Confirm how your trades are taxed with a qualified tax professional.
FAQ
Do futures trade after hours?
Yes. Index futures keep trading when the stock market closes at 4:00 p.m. ET, and continue until the 5:00 p.m. ET halt. They then reopen at 6:00 p.m. ET. Liquidity is thinner outside the U.S. daytime session, so expect wider spreads and more slippage.
When do futures open and close?
CME Globex equity index futures open Sunday at 6:00 p.m. ET and close Friday at 5:00 p.m. ET. Between those times, trading pauses from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. ET each weekday. Holiday schedules differ, so check CME's calendar.
Can I trade futures 24 hours a day?
Not quite. Futures trade nearly 23 hours a day, five days a week, because of the one-hour daily maintenance halt. Automation can run through those hours, but you need rules for thin overnight liquidity and for the gap at the reopen.
What is the best time to trade ES and NQ?
Most day traders concentrate on the period after the 9:30 a.m. ET stock market open, and many also trade the afternoon into the close. The midday lull is usually slower and choppier. Test any window in simulation before you trade it live.
Sources
- CME Group: Holiday and Trading Hours
- CME Group: E-mini S&P 500 Product Overview
- CME Group: E-mini Nasdaq-100 contract specifications
- FINRA: Extended-Hours Trading, Know the Risks
- FINRA: Security Futures Risk Disclosure Statement
- Charles Schwab: Overnight Trading in Futures Markets