How to Read the Night Futures Chart

The dashed horizontal line is the previous regular close. A bar above it is trading higher than the last price of the day, a bar below it lower. The change at the top of the screen takes the same value as its denominator, so it can be set against the daily change quoted during the day in the same way.

Overnight there is really only one thing to read. Which side of the reference line the price is on now, and whether the distance is widening or closing.

The bar-size buttons decide how coarsely the same trades are grouped, anywhere from 1-minute up to 30-minute. A 1-minute bar keeps the trace of every fill and shows plenty of small ripples, while a 30-minute bar loses the ripples and leaves the larger sweep. Coarse bars are easier for judging direction and fine bars for seeing what just happened.

Whatever the size, a minute in which nothing trades draws no bar. Grouping more coarsely makes the gaps less visible, though it does not remove the fact that nothing traded.

A gap on the horizontal axis means nothing traded in those minutes. The values are not stitched across it, so the gap itself is information. Gaps are common on a night with few participants, and around the moments overseas data arrives the bars tighten up and then thin out again in a pattern that repeats.

The volume bars underneath give the number of contracts filled inside each bar. If the price moved a long way on thin volume, a small number of orders pushed it. If the volume was heavy, several participants moved the same way.

The marker beside the name shows the session and the connection together. Live means the session is open and trades are reaching the screen, Connecting means the session has opened but the live feed has not been picked up yet, and Offline means the session is closed and the last completed session is still on the screen.

The table of key figures is computed from the same bars as the chart. The open, the high, the low, the last price, the change from the reference price and the volume all refresh as trades arrive, so the table and the chart never say different things.

The night price is not the index. The cash index is frozen at the moment the regular market closes, so what moves overnight is the expectation of the next day rather than a settled value. Nor does the last price of the night set the next day's opening price. There are days when the direction turns before the open, so it is safer to read it as a reference value only.