Which session is driving the market right now — Sydney, Tokyo, London, New York and CME crypto futures, live, with daylight-saving shifts handled automatically. Crypto never closes, but its volume still follows the sun.
Session times follow each desk's local clock, so daylight-saving shifts are already applied. Crypto itself never closes — sessions matter because volume and volatility still cluster around them, and because CME gaps only exist while Globex is halted.
Each session is defined by its desk's local working hours, so the UTC times shift twice a year with daylight saving — the reason hardcoded "London opens at 08:00 UTC" cheat sheets are wrong for half the year. The London–New York overlap (roughly four hours around the US morning) is historically the highest-volume window in both FX and crypto.
CME's crypto futures trade nearly around the clock on Globex — Sunday 17:00 to Friday 16:00 Chicago time, with a one-hour maintenance halt at 16:00 CT each weekday — but not on weekends. Every "CME gap" is simply the spot market moving while Globex is halted; the gap exists on the futures chart, not in the actual market.
Empirically, yes — volume, spreads and volatility cluster during London and New York hours and thin out in the Asia afternoon and weekends. A strategy's fills and slippage can differ meaningfully by session, which is why session filters show up in strategy specs. Whether a session filter adds edge for your specific strategy is testable — on out-of-sample data, like everything else.
Sunday 17:00 to Friday 16:00 US Central Time on Globex, with a maintenance halt from 16:00 to 17:00 CT each weekday. The famous weekend 'CME gaps' happen because spot keeps trading from Friday 16:00 CT until Sunday 17:00 CT while the futures chart stands still.
Daylight saving. New York moves between UTC−5 and UTC−4, London between UTC+0 and UTC+1, Sydney between UTC+10 and UTC+11 — and they don't all switch on the same weekend, so the session map genuinely rearranges itself four times a year. Tokyo never shifts. This page computes each session from its local clock, so what you see is already correct for today.
Sessions tell you when the market is loud. Whether your strategy makes money in the noise is a different question — the one the grader answers.
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