The Anatomy of a Globex Night

Lessons from the Darkside · Lesson 3

The night session has a schedule the way a hospital has a schedule: things happen at set times, most of them quietly, and the quiet is where people get hurt. Here is the clock, hour by hour, so that nothing after dark surprises you except price.

The night is not one long undifferentiated session. It is a series of windows, each with its own participants and its own personality. Learn the clock and half of the confusion goes away. All times here are Eastern.

The clock

Time (ET)	What happens	What I do
4:00 pm	Settlement. The day session’s reference price for the night.	Note where we settled relative to the day’s value and the levels.
5:00 to 6:00 pm	The daily maintenance halt. No trading.	Pre-session prep: quiet, principles, levels, news scan, bias. No grading of anything.
6:00 pm	Globex reopens, usually near settlement.	Watch. Do not trade the first candles.
6:00 to 7:00 pm	The Globex initial balance forms.	Mark the IB high and low once the hour closes.
7:00 to 9:00 pm	Tokyo opens (8 pm in summer, 7 pm in winter). The first real wave of overnight participation.	My most productive window. First touches of fresh levels, fades at the overnight extremes.
9:30 pm	Hong Kong and Shanghai open. A second, smaller impulse.	Still active, more selective.
11:00 pm to 2:00 am	The quiet hours. Asia at lunch, Europe asleep.	Usually flat. Lesson 7 covers why.
2:00 to 3:30 am	Frankfurt, then London. The heaviest overnight volume.	If I am awake, the London open is a session of its own (Lesson 6).
8:30 am	US economic data.	Not a night trade. Know the calendar so a resting order is not sitting through it.
9:30 am	RTH opens. The night is over.	Charts stay on. Trading stops.

Three things the clock teaches

• Volume arrives in waves, and each wave belongs to a geography. When a wave arrives, the levels get tested. Between waves, they mostly do not.
• The first hour is a range, not a trade. The Globex IB is information. Breaks of it on Tokyo volume mean something; breaks of it at midnight usually do not.
• Your best hours are a choice. Nobody can trade the whole night. I trade the reopen through the Tokyo window and I am done. Someone in Europe might choose the London open instead. Pick a window and own it.

How the night relates to the day

The overnight session inherits the day session’s levels and hands its own back in the morning. The overnight high and low, and where price sits relative to them at 9:30, are among the first things day traders look at. Knowing that is useful even though you will be asleep: it tells you which of your levels will matter most to the people who come after you.

Lesson 4 looks at the volume in each of these windows and how to see it on your own chart.

Questions people ask

What is the Globex initial balance?

The high and low of the first hour after the 6 pm Eastern reopen. I mark it once the hour closes and read the rest of the night against it, the way day traders read the session against the 9:30 to 10:30 range.

When is the overnight futures session most active?

In waves: the 6 pm reopen, the Tokyo open about two hours later, the Hong Kong and Shanghai open around 9:30 pm Eastern, and then the European opens between roughly 2 and 3:30 am Eastern, which bring the heaviest overnight volume. The 8:30 am US data is the last spike before the day session.

Why is there no trading from 5 to 6 pm Eastern?

CME runs a daily maintenance halt for the equity index and many other contracts. It is also the natural time to prepare for the session.

Next lesson: Futures Volume at Night.

Photo: Jon Tyson on Unsplash.