WTI market hours: when WTI crude oil actually moves

23,495 fifteen-minute bars of WTI crude oil 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 WTI open and close?

WTI is a contract on the NYMEX Light Sweet Crude Oil future (CL), 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 WTI bars rather than from the exchange's, and on this instrument the two agree: the feed's only daily gap is that break. The measurement sees it as 21:00 and 22:00 UTC falling short of a full hour of trading — the earlier of the two while the United States is on daylight time and the later one for the rest of the year, which is the same sixty minutes moving with Chicago's clock rather than two separate stoppages. Every other hour of the week runs straight through.

The week opens into the quieter part of WTI's day: 20.0 cents per 15-minute bar in the first hours of the trading week — the Sunday evening cells of the grid below — against 34.7 at its busiest and 23.3 in a typical hour. Walking the clock forward from there, its range across the week does not reach a typical hour until 07:00 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 CL contract expires every month and is replaced by the next one. The bars below are the broker's continuous WTI 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 WTI crude oil 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 WTI, by measured range

Each bar is the median distance between the high and the low of a fifteen-minute candle at that hour, in cents. 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 34.7 cents; the quietest hour is 04:00 UTC at 10.3 cents. That is a spread of 3.4× between the liveliest and the deadest hour of this market's day. There are no bars here for part of 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 WTI: 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 WTI 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 2.5 times as much of WTI's measured movement as an average hour of the late New York 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.

WTI 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 New York grid is the tighter of the two: its busiest slot holds 34 outsized bars against 29 in UTC.

The largest single fifteen-minute bar in the period was 1358 cents on 2026-03-23 (Mon 12:00 UTC) — 62.4× 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 WTI

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 WTI 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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