Electronic Trading Hours (ETH)

ETH stands for Electronic Trading Hours. These are the hours outside of Regular Trading Hours (RTH) that a futures contract will trade.

Typically, RTH in the electronic market will match the same opening and closing times that the equivalent pit traded future will be trading for, or in the case where the pit traded future no longer exists (because the pit has been closed down) this will represent the hours when the pit used to be open. After RTH has completed there is usually a short break of 30 to 60 minutes which the exchanges use for maintenance and for running batch processing jobs to complete transactions for the day's trading. Once that is done the ETH session starts and this runs overnight until the following morning when RTH starts again.

ETH typically starts at around 5:30pm and ends the following morning at 8:30am Central Time U.S.