Stats › Intraday and market microstructure › Overnight futures
The overnight futures session
The US cash session runs 09:30 to 16:00 New York time. The E-mini S&P 500 futures contract that tracks the same index runs from Sunday evening to Friday evening with a one hour break each day. So for most of the week there is a price for the S&P 500 and no stock exchange open to make it.
That's the overnight futures session. I put this page together because almost everything written about it is written from the return side, and the return side already has its own page here. This one is about the session structure and the volume. Where the trading actually is, hour by hour, and how much of it there is.
The short version is that the overnight session is real but it is much thinner than the headlines suggest, and the exchange publishes less about it than you'd expect. Six sources at the bottom, all dated. One of the findings on this page is a thing CME doesn't publish at all.
The E-mini S&P 500 trades from Sunday 18:00 to Friday 17:00 New York time with a daily one hour break, so the US cash session covers under a third of the contract's open hours. The New York Fed's reconstruction of the trade data puts the overnight share of E-mini volume at about 2% until 2002, about 15% by 2010, flat to 2018, and about 20% across 2019 and 2020. Between 2009 and 2020 volumes in Asian hours ran 50 to 100 times lower than in US hours. CME publishes a non-US hours share for equity index options, a record 257,000 contracts a day in 2025 or 18% of the total, but I could not find one published for equity index futures.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart, 1 table and 6 named sources, roughly 2350 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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