NQ Futures Trading Hours: Asia, London and New York Sessions

This guide lays out the official hours in Eastern Time, the daylight-saving trap that catches traders twice a year, and what published research says about the overnight and regular sessions.

NQ futures trading hours on CME Globex

E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures trade on CME Globex. According to CME Group's contract specs, the market is open from 6:00 p.m. ET on Sunday to 5:00 p.m. ET on Friday, with a daily maintenance break from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET. So a futures "trading day" actually starts the evening before: when your chart shows Tuesday's session, its first bars printed on Monday evening.

Each contract is worth $20 times the Nasdaq-100 index and moves in steps of 0.25 point, or $5 per contract. The Micro E-mini, MNQ, is one tenth of that size.

The three cash sessions, in Eastern Time

The "Asian", "London" and "New York" sessions aren't CME sessions. They're the hours when each region's main stock exchange is open, which is when most local traders are at their desks.

1. 01Tokyo

   9:00 – 15:30 JST · 20:00 – 02:30 · 19:00 – 01:30

2. 02London

   08:00 – 16:30 UK time · 03:00 – 11:30 · 03:00 – 11:30

3. 03New York

   09:30 – 16:00 ET · 09:30 – 16:00 · 09:30 – 16:00

A visual summary of the article's table — not a performance chart or a new backtest.

The Tokyo Stock Exchange pushed its close from 15:00 to 15:30 on November 5, 2024, the first change of its kind in about 70 years, as Jiji Press reported that day. Trading now breaks for lunch from 11:30 to 12:30. London's hours move with the U.K. clock, which is why its Eastern Time hours stay the same in summer and winter for most of the year.

The daylight-saving trap

The U.S. and the U.K. change their clocks on different dates. For two to three weeks in March, and for about a week around the end of October, the gap between London and New York is four hours instead of five. During those weeks, the London open lands at 04:00 ET, not 03:00 ET, and any "London session" drawn on a chart with fixed times is off by an hour.

Japan doesn't do daylight saving at all, so Tokyo's hours in Eastern Time shift by an hour twice a year, as the table shows.

1. 01Tokyo

   9:00 – 15:30 JST · 20:00 – 02:30 · 19:00 – 01:30

2. 02London

   08:00 – 16:30 UK time · 03:00 – 11:30 · 03:00 – 11:30

3. 03New York

   09:30 – 16:00 ET · 09:30 – 16:00 · 09:30 – 16:00

A visual summary of the article's table — not a performance chart or a new backtest.

If you rely on session boxes or session stats, check how your charting tool handles these weeks. A lot of indicators use fixed Eastern Time windows and quietly mislabel them.

When is the best time to trade NQ futures?

There's no single best hour for everyone. But volume and volatility in NQ aren't spread evenly across the 23 trading hours, and a few things are well documented.

The New York cash open is where the action is. At 9:30 ET the underlying stocks start trading, and the futures market has to absorb the cash market's opening orders. Scheduled U.S. data at 8:30 and 10:00 ET add to the flow.

The overnight session is thinner. With fewer people trading, spreads are wider and smaller orders can push price further. Thin doesn't mean unimportant, though: research on the Nasdaq-100 ETF found that a big share of its returns came between the close and the next open (more below).

London is the bridge. The London morning overlaps with the end of Asian trading and, later, with the U.S. pre-market. European data and central bank news land in this window.

What the research says about overnight and regular hours

Two lines of published research are useful here.

In a 2011 article in the Journal of Asset Management, Returns in trading versus non-trading hours: The difference is day and night, Michael A. Kelly and Steven P. Clark compared returns inside and outside trading hours for broad index ETFs. For the Nasdaq-100 ETF between 1999 and 2006, they report a geometric average close-to-open risk premium of about +23.7%, against about −23.3% from open to close. Over that period, the index's gains came while the cash market was closed, and those overnight returns were also less volatile.

In Market intraday momentum (Journal of Financial Economics, 2018), Lei Gao, Yufeng Han, Sophia Zhengzi Li and Guofu Zhou showed that the first half-hour of the U.S. trading day, measured from the previous close, predicts the last half-hour. Guido Baltussen, Zhi Da, Sten Lammers and Martin Martens later extended that finding to more than 60 futures markets between 1974 and 2020 in Hedging demand and market intraday momentum (Journal of Financial Economics, 2021).

We go deeper on both in The First and Last Half-Hour and Overnight vs Intraday Returns.

Why Quantum Bias focuses on 9:30–12:00 ET

Our Daily Bias covers the New York morning, from 9:30 to 12:00 ET. That window holds the cash open, most of the morning's scheduled releases, and the stretch where cash-market traders either confirm or reject the overnight move. A read written before 9:30 can then be checked against a clear, fixed window.

Practical checklist

• Set your platform to Eastern Time and label sessions by exchange hours, not by habit.
• Mark the overnight high and low before the New York open. They're the day's first reference prices.
• Watch the daylight-saving weeks in March and late October.
• Remember the daily break. There's no trading from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET, and positions carry through it.
• Know the calendar. A release at 8:30 ET lands before the cash open. One at 10:00 ET lands inside it.

How to mark sessions on a chart

A session box is only as good as its definition. Before you draw one, decide three things and write them down:

1. The reference clock. Use each exchange's local hours, converted to Eastern Time for each date, not a fixed Eastern Time window.
2. What the box measures. The session's high and low, its open and close, or both. A box built on 1-minute bars and one built on 15-minute bars can show different extremes.
3. Which contract. NQ rolls to a new contract every quarter. Around the roll, the front month and the next month trade at different prices, so a session high on one isn't a session high on the other.

Once the definition is locked in, you can start counting: how often New York takes out the London high, how often the overnight range holds until noon. Without it, nobody can check any stat about "the London session".

Common session mistakes

• Treating "Asia" as one market. Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Sydney all keep different hours. Most session tools mean Tokyo, but not all of them.
• Forgetting the futures date. The futures day starts the evening before, so "Monday's overnight session" starts on Sunday evening.

Limits

• Exchange hours change. Tokyo changed its close in 2024. Check each exchange's own page before relying on a session box.
• Holidays. U.S. and foreign holidays shorten or remove sessions. CME publishes holiday hours separately.
• Research periods. The overnight-return study covers 1999–2006, and later periods may differ, which is why we plan to measure it ourselves.

Sources

• CME Group. E-mini Nasdaq-100 Futures: Contract Specs (trading hours, contract unit, tick size). cmegroup.com. Accessed October 12, 2026.
• Jiji Press. (2024, November 5). TSE Extends Stock Trading Hours by 30 Minutes. Nippon.com. nippon.com
• Kelly, M. A., & Clark, S. P. (2011). Returns in trading versus non-trading hours: The difference is day and night. Journal of Asset Management, 12(2), 132–145. IDEAS/RePEc
• Gao, L., Han, Y., Li, S. Z., & Zhou, G. (2018). Market intraday momentum. Journal of Financial Economics, 129(2), 394–414. Washington University profile
• Baltussen, G., Da, Z., Lammers, S., & Martens, M. (2021). Hedging demand and market intraday momentum. Journal of Financial Economics, 142(1), 377–403. IDEAS/RePEc

FAQ

What are NQ futures trading hours? Sunday 6:00 p.m. ET to Friday 5:00 p.m. ET on CME Globex, with a daily break from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET.

What time is the London session in Eastern Time? 03:00 to 11:30 ET for most of the year, and 04:00 to 12:30 ET during the weeks when the U.S. and U.K. clocks are out of sync.

What time is the Asian session in Eastern Time? Tokyo trades from 9:00 to 15:30 local time: 20:00 to 02:30 ET in U.S. summer and 19:00 to 01:30 ET in U.S. winter.

Which session moves NQ the most? The New York session packs in volume around the 9:30 ET open and scheduled U.S. data, but research shows overnight returns on the Nasdaq-100 can be big.

What's the best time to trade NQ futures? The New York morning, from the 9:30 ET open, has the most volume and scheduled U.S. news. The overnight session is thinner, with wider spreads. Whether it works for you depends on your strategy and your costs.

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Research and education only. Not financial advice. Futures trading involves substantial risk of loss.

How this article was made: drafted with AI assistance from the sources listed above; facts and figures checked by Gabriel Décarie and Karel Panneton.