The next trading holiday is Monday, Jan. 17, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. On this day, CME Group Equity products will halt at 1 p.m. US/Eastern and resume at 6:00 p.m. US/Eastern. Note that Interest Rate, FX, NYMEX, and COMEX products may observe other hours, so please check the official CME Group schedule for further details.
What’s the next holiday? That would be President’s Day, Monday, Feb. 21 where a halt occurs for the same period, from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. US/Eastern.
After that, approximately two months goes by until Good Friday occurs, where a closure occurs for Friday, Apr. 15. Trading resumes on Sunday, Apr. 18 at 6 p.m. US/Eastern. Compared to the halts, this closure should say to you, “There will be no E-mini for you to trade in the morning or afternoon of Friday, Apr. 15.”
Yes, there are more trading holidays throughout the year. As usual, we plan to list them as they come closer.
It’s important to remember that during partial (aka “halt”) trading days, you may see less volatility due to an absence of big players. With less volatility, there’s a chance price may tend to go sideways more often than establishing a trend. If you must trade partial days, please do so cautiously.
In addition to observing trading holidays, scheduled financial news events (see our free news indicator for NinjaTrader), you should be aware of contract rollover dates. At this point in time, you should not be using any “12-21” charts. Rather, the E-mini S&P (ES) chart you should be using at the moment is “03-22”. The date in quotes represents the active contract period. The March 2022 contract is the correct one to use at this time.
Some time in March of 2022 (Mar. 10 to be exact), you will need to roll over to the June 2022 contract (“06-22”) because that’s what becomes active and the prior March contract phases out.
You see, there are four contract periods per year and they occur in March, June, September, and December; every four months. If you are still using the old contract, you may notice the candles on your chart “dry up” into dojis. Fortunately, NinjaTrader 8 tells you when it’s time to roll over and makes it easy to roll over all of your charts with two button clicks. For further reading, check out our rollover instructions here.
