Night Futures Trading Hours

The night session starts at 18:00 KST on a weekday evening and ends at 06:00 KST the next morning. That stretch, a little under twelve hours, covers the back half of the European trading day and the whole of the United States regular session, so it is the window in which events abroad reach the price while the Korean regular market is shut.

A session is named for the day it ends rather than the day it starts. A session that opened on Monday evening is the Tuesday session, and the session date on the screen and the table of key figures follow the same rule.

A session that starts on Friday evening ends at 06:00 on Saturday morning, and nothing opens again until Monday evening. On Korean market holidays the night session does not run either. On those days the screen keeps the bars from the last completed session with an offline marker, and they change when a new session starts the following trading evening.

On days when only the overseas markets are shut the session does run, though trades are rare and the bars can come out sparse. Plenty of empty space does not mean the screen has frozen.

What the chart draws is the quarterly contract nearest to expiry. Once the final trade on the second Thursday of the expiry month is done the chart moves to the following quarter, and the price level can jump a little where the contract changes. The difference between the two contracts reflects the interest and dividends over the time left to expiry, so it is not the same thing as the index having moved.

In expiry week trading shifts from the near contract to the next one during the day, so the night book can be thinner than usual as well.

The contract traded at night is the same one traded during the day. Volume filled at night builds up in the same open interest. What differs is who is trading. During the day, institutions that handle the cash basket alongside keep the book thick, and at night that trade is hard to do, so an order of the same size moves the price further.

The reference price comes from the regular session too. The reference line on the screen and the change take the previous regular close as their denominator. The next day's regular opening price is set by a separate call auction, and the last price of the night is used only as a reference value for gauging where that open might start.