A recurring point of confusion for traders is what happens to CME Globex around a Monday holiday like Labor Day. The short answer: the market does not simply stay shut. It opens as scheduled the evening before, then behaves differently partway through the holiday itself.
Take Labor Day, Monday, 7 September 2026, as the working example. Globex opens at its regular 5:00 PM Central Time (6:00 PM Eastern) on Sunday evening, 6 September. That session is not a bonus extra day, it is simply the start of Monday’s trade date arriving on schedule. Nothing about the open itself changes because a holiday is coming.
What does change is what happens once Monday gets underway. Rather than running through to its usual afternoon close, the session halts early, typically around midday Central Time for heavily traded contracts such as the E-mini S&P 500 (ES). This is often called an “early halt” rather than a full closure, a useful distinction: a full closure means no trading at all for that trade date (Good Friday is the clearest example on the 2026 calendar), whereas an early halt means the session simply runs shorter than normal before pausing partway through the day.
Trading then resumes that same Monday evening, again at the regular 5:00 PM CT open, this time for Tuesday’s trade date. From a trader’s perspective, the practical effect is a single day with a shortened afternoon window rather than any gap in market access.
This pattern repeats across most Monday holidays on the exchange calendar, MLK Day, Presidents’ Day, and Memorial Day among them, though the exact halt time can vary slightly by product. Good Friday and days like Thanksgiving and Christmas are the true exceptions, where the day session closes outright rather than merely shortening.
The practical takeaway: don’t assume a US market holiday means no Globex access. Check whether it is a Monday-style early halt or a genuine full-day closure, since the two require very different planning for open positions and automated strategies.
This article was written by Eamonn Sheridan at investinglive.com.