How to read the futures dashboard
A futures contract is an agreement to buy or sell an asset at a set price on a future date. Each row here is the front-month contract — the nearest expiry that most traders use — for a major U.S.-listed market, updating live while CME Globex is open.
Almost 24 hours a day
Globex trades from Sunday 6 PM to Friday 5 PM Eastern with a one-hour maintenance break each weekday from 5 to 6 PM. That makes futures the first place to see how markets react to overnight news, long before the stock market opens. The status badge above tracks that schedule, including CME holidays and early closes.
Change, range and volume
Change is measured against the prior session’s settlement price. The day-range bar shows where the last trade sits between the session’s high and low. Volume counts contracts traded in the current session; a high reading early in the day usually means news is moving that market.
Size: multiplier, notional and ticks
Every contract has a multiplier that converts its quoted price into dollars. The E-mini S&P 500 is $50 per index point, so at 6,000 one contract controls $300,000 of stock — its notional value. The tick is the smallest allowed price move and the tick value is what that move is worth per contract. Micro contracts are one-tenth the size of their E-mini siblings, which is why both appear.
Long-term charts and rolls
Longer chart ranges splice each expiring contract onto the next. In Raw mode the price can jump on a roll by the difference between the two expiries (for rates and commodities in particular) — that step is a roll, not a market move. Roll-adjusted mode, the heat map’s longer periods, the correlation matrix and the seasonality chart all remove those roll days, using each contract’s roll calendar.