US Stock Market Hours: When Wall Street Opens and Closes

The key US exchanges

Three groups of exchanges handle the bulk of US trading:

• NYSE (New York Stock Exchange): the world’s largest stock exchange by market capitalisation. Home to most blue-chip stocks.Large, established companies with a long track record of stable earnings, like Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, or JPMorgan.
• NASDAQ: known for its tech-heavy listings (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon). Same regular hours as NYSE.
• CME Group: four derivativesFinancial contracts whose value is based on an underlying asset, like a stock index or a commodity. Futures and options are the most common types. exchanges (CME, CBOT, NYMEX, COMEX) covering futures and options on indices, commodities, currencies, and interest rates. Nearly 24-hour trading on weekdays.

NYSE and NASDAQ trading hours

Both the NYSE and NASDAQ share the same regular session. Extended hours vary slightly.

Pre-market and after-hoursTrading sessions outside the regular 9:30 AM – 4:00 PM window. Available through most brokers, but with thinner order books. sessions have lower liquidity and wider spreads.The difference between the best buy and sell price. A wider spread means you pay more to enter and exit a position. Prices can move sharply on thin volume, so position sizing matters more than during regular hours.

CME Group trading hours (futures and options)

CME Group products trade nearly around the clock on weekdays, with a brief daily maintenance break.

Triple and quadruple witching days

A triple witching day is a session where three types of derivative contracts expire at the same time: index options, stock options, and index futures. On a quadruple witching day, single-stock futures expire as well.

Volatility and trading volume typically spike on these days, as many positions are unwound while others are rolled over to the next expiry.

Triple witching falls on the third Friday of March, June, September, and December. These are also the quadruple witching dates when single-stock futures are included.

US stock market holidays in 2026

US exchanges close entirely on these dates. Some holidays also have early-close days (markets close at 1:00 PM ET the day before).

Best times of day to trade Wall Street

Not all trading hours are equal. Here are the windows that consistently see the highest volume and volatility on US markets:

• The first 30 minutes (9:30 – 10:00 AM ET): overnight orders flood in, gaps form, and price discovery is fast. The highest-volume window of the day. High opportunity, but also high risk for beginners.
• The lunch lull (11:30 AM – 1:30 PM ET): volume drops, spreads can widen, and moves tend to be choppy. Many day traders step aside during this window.
• The last hour (3:00 – 4:00 PM ET): institutional traders rebalance, closing auction volume picks up, and trends often accelerate or reverse. The second most active window.
• US economic data releases: scheduled releases (jobs report, CPI, Fed decisions) move prices sharply. Most major releases land at 8:30 AM ET (pre-market) or 2:00 PM ET (Fed).

Remember to account for daylight saving time changes when planning your sessions. The US switches clocks on different dates than Europe, creating a one-to-two-week window (usually in March and November) where the time difference shifts by one hour.