Election night for ES and NQ traders: when results land and how the futures trade through the night

When polls close and results land

Polls close in waves across six time zones. The first close at 6:00 PM ET in parts of Indiana and Kentucky, the largest group closes between 7:00 and 9:00 PM ET, and the last close at 1:00 AM ET in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. For a trader in the UK that is 11:00 PM to 6:00 AM, with the busiest stretch between midnight and 2:00 AM.

A poll closing is not a result. Each state counts at its own pace, and close races, or states with a lot of postal ballots to count, can take days. News organisations call a race only when they judge that the trailing candidate can no longer catch up, and control of Congress waits for the last of the races that decide it.

That is the part that matters to a trader. On a midterm night there may be no single moment when the answer arrives, so the market prices each result as it comes, and it can still be doing so when the stock market opens.

How ES and NQ trade through the night

ES and NQ trade on CME's Globex platform almost around the clock, from 6:00 PM ET on Sunday to 5:00 PM ET on Friday, with a pause from 5:00 to 6:00 PM ET each day. On election night they reopen at 6:00 PM ET, as the first polls close, and trade straight through to the stock market's open at 9:30 AM ET the next morning. For most of the night, the futures are where the first reaction to every result shows up.

That trading is much thinner than during the day. Fewer orders sit in the book, so a burst of buying or selling moves the price further and faster than it would at 11:00 in the morning, and a stop can be filled some distance from where it was placed. Results also arrive in bursts, as polls close and counties report, so the futures tend to move in steps rather than in a smooth line.

There is a limit to how far ES can go. Outside the day session, CME will not let ES trade more than 7% above or below the previous afternoon's reference price. On election night in 2016, when that limit was 5%, S&P 500 futures fell all the way to it. They recovered most of the fall before the open, and ES finished the next day 1.2% higher.

The direction can also change more than once. In 2020, with the presidential race too close to call, the AP reported that S&P 500 futures "rose, fell and rose again" overnight before settling on a gain of 1.9% at 8:31 AM ET. In that one session, ES traded as much as 1.3% below Tuesday's close and as much as 3.5% above it. Our market hours clock shows the futures pause and the overnight session in your own time zone.

What it means for the next morning's open

By 9:30 AM ET the futures have had fifteen and a half hours to price the results, and the stock market opens wherever they have taken it. That is the gap: the distance between Tuesday's close and Wednesday's opening price.

The gap is the market's first answer, not its last. On each of the last four election nights it was only part of the day's move, and the rest came after the open. In 2016 the overnight move reversed altogether.

Two things follow for a day trader. The first is that the overnight move is already in the price at 9:30, so the question on the morning after is not what the results were but whether the market keeps going in the direction of the gap or turns against it. The second is that the open is not the only scheduled moment that morning. In 2026, Wednesday 4 November also brings the trade figures at 8:30 AM ET and the ISM services survey at 10:00 AM ET.

The last four election nights in ES and NQ

The table below covers the session that starts at 6:00 PM ET on election night and ends at 5:00 PM ET the next day, so it takes in the whole night and the day after. Each range is set against the 20-day average range at the time, which is the fair way to compare years when ES traded at very different prices.

The two presidential nights were the big ones: in 2020 and 2024, ES covered more than two and a half times its average day. The two midterm nights were much closer to ordinary sessions for their time. Four nights are too few to make a rule, and a result the market did not expect could make any night a big one.

The 2022 midterms are the closest match to this year. By the morning after the vote, which party would control Congress was still unclear, and ES fell 80 points on the day, or 2.1%, in a session whose range was almost exactly its 20-day average. Control of the Senate was called on the Saturday, and control of the House eight days after the vote.

The bigger move came two days later. On Thursday 10 November the October inflation report came in lower than expected, and ES rose 205 points, or 5.5%, in a session 2.2 times its average range, while NQ rose 802 points, or 7.4%. That week, a scheduled release moved the market more than twice as far as the election did. In 2026 the jobs report lands on Friday 6 November, three days after the vote.

How to trade election week

• Decide before 5:00 PM ET on Tuesday whether to hold through the night. Holding a position through election night means holding it through hours of thin trading while the results arrive. A day trader is usually flat by then anyway. If you do hold, size it for a gap rather than a normal session, which our position size calculator can help with.
• Trade smaller on the morning after, or not at all. The session opens with a gap and can stay fast while late results come in. Trading smaller costs little, and sitting out the first hour, or the whole day, is a plan rather than a missed opportunity.
• Check what is still uncalled before the open. On a midterm night the answer can come in pieces. Know which races are still open at 9:30 AM ET, because a call during the session is news the market has to price.
• Measure the night against a normal day. Compare how far ES and NQ travelled overnight with their average daily range. A night that has already covered most of a normal day changes what a sensible target or stop looks like, and our guide to how many points ES and NQ move a day shows how to find that average.
• Keep the rest of the week on your calendar. Election week still has its scheduled data, and in 2022 the biggest move of the week came from that, not from the vote. Our guide to how CPI, jobs reports and Fed days move stocks covers the Friday jobs report.

Neither of our tools forecasts elections. Our Bias Bot reads the overnight news before every open, and our Volatility Scale measures how far the market has already moved before the open against its average range, so on the morning after, both start from what the night actually did. For the other kinds of day worth recognising in advance, see our guide to when not to day trade.

The rest of election week

The midterms fall in an ordinary week for scheduled data, as listed at the time of writing.

There is no Fed decision that week: the Fed's October meeting ends on Wednesday 28 October and the next on Wednesday 9 December. Most of the biggest tech companies report the week before the vote, and Apple on the Monday night before it, which our guide to earnings season for index traders covers. None of this is advice about your money.