US30 market hours: when the Dow Jones index actually moves

22,724 fifteen-minute bars of the Dow Jones index from the last 12 months, 2025-08 to 2026-08, sorted by the hour they belong to. No forecast and no advice — just how far this market has tended to travel at each hour of the day, and how often it has done something far out of the ordinary.

What time does US30 open and close?

US30 is a contract on the CBOT E-mini Dow future (YM), and the future is where its price is made. On CME Globex that contract trades from Sunday 17:00 in Chicago until Friday 16:00 in Chicago — 18:00 to 17:00 in New York — and stops every day for a sixty-minute maintenance break at 16:00 Chicago time. That is the exchange's own schedule, published by CME Group in US Central time; it is the one paragraph on this page not measured from the bars below.

The tables below are measured from this broker's US30 bars rather than from the exchange's, and here the two do not agree. 20:00, 21:00 and 22:00 UTC fall short of a full hour of trading in the measurement, and the exchange's sixty-minute break can only account for two of them. The rest — 20:00 UTC — is the broker's: its US30 contract stops before CME Globex does, so the last part of the futures afternoon has no bars on this page at all, and the hours around it are thinner here than the market itself was. Every other hour of the week runs straight through.

US30 opens the week at about its ordinary pace: 37.2 points per 15-minute bar in the first hours of the trading week — the Sunday evening cells of the grid below — against 97.0 at its busiest and 36.5 in a typical hour. Walking the clock forward from there, its range across the week does not reach a typical hour until 08:00 UTC.

Chicago hours on purpose. In UTC that daily break is 21:00 to 22:00 while the United States is on daylight time and 22:00 to 23:00 for the rest of the year, and the week opens at 22:00 on Sunday for part of the year and 23:00 for the rest — because Chicago changes its clocks and UTC does not, so any page giving you one fixed UTC time for it is wrong for months at a stretch. Europe does not change on the same weekend as the United States either: for about three weeks each March and one each late October, the usual conversion between a European clock and Chicago's is an hour out.

A future is a series rather than a single instrument — the YM contract expires every quarter and is replaced by the next one. The bars below are the broker's continuous US30 series, not any one contract, so nothing on this page describes what happens at a rollover.

Knowing the market is open is the easy half. The rest of this page is the other one: which of those hours the Dow Jones index actually moves in, measured over 312 days.

Every hour below is shown in UTC. Turn on JavaScript and the page will convert them to your own timezone.

Busiest and quietest hours for US30, by measured range

Each bar is the median distance between the high and the low of a fifteen-minute candle at that hour, in points. The median rather than the average, because a handful of violent bars would drag an average upwards and describe an hour nobody has ever traded.

The busiest hour is 14:00 UTC at 97.0 points; the quietest hour is 04:00 UTC at 18.9 points. That is a spread of 5.1× between the liveliest and the deadest hour of this market's day. There are no bars here for part of 20:00, 21:00 and 22:00 UTC, so those hours are charted but left out of the busiest and quietest comparison.

The best time to trade US30: volatility by hour and weekday

The same measurement, split by day of the week. Darker is a larger median fifteen-minute range. Blank cells are hours the market was closed. This grid is not converted, and neither is the session table or either spike table below it — each keeps the clock its heading names: shifting a weekday grid is exact, but it moves late Monday hours into Tuesday, and a table that quietly rotates its own columns is harder to trust than one that names its clock.

Which US30 session carries the movement

Sessions overlap and are not equal in length, so the last column is the one worth reading: how much of the market's total measured travel happens in an average hour of that session.

An average hour of the London–New York overlap carries 3.0 times as much of US30's measured movement as an average hour of the Asian hours.

Share is computed from the hourly medians above, so it describes a typical hour rather than the sum of every bar — one violent afternoon does not move it.

US30 hours that go wrong: where the outsized bars cluster

A spike here means a fifteen-minute bar more than three times the median for its own weekday and hour, after each bar has been measured against the preceding month rather than against the whole period — so a market that has simply grown more volatile does not report its recent weeks as one long anomaly. From 2025-08 to 2026-08 these slots produced the most.

The same bars, grouped by New York time. Where a cluster is tighter on one clock than the other, the slot moves with US daylight saving rather than staying fixed in UTC. For this instrument the UTC grid is the tighter of the two: its busiest slot holds 20 outsized bars against 19 in New York.

The largest single fifteen-minute bar in the period was 737 points on 2026-04-07 (Tue 22:00 UTC) — 30.1× the median bar for that UTC slot. (The New York table grades the same bar against its New York slot, which has a different median, so the two multiples differ.)

What Turnmarks does with US30

Turnmarks watches this market on the hourly chart and marks the bar where a push stops going anywhere. It does not tell you to buy or sell, and it is not a signals group. Every past marker's outcome is measured and published on the US30 page, so you can judge it before paying for anything. There is a free plan and it needs no card.

Market hours for the other instruments

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