How to Trade the ES Futures Monday Open: The Weekly Setup Strategy

Two Definitions of the Weekly Open

Before you trade Monday, decide what 'weekly open' means, because there are two common answers. One is the first Globex price after the weekend break, when the market reopens Sunday evening (typically 5:00pm CT, 6:00pm ET, but check the CME schedule and holiday calendar for your product). The other is the first print of the Monday regular session at 9:30am ET. They're different prices, and they're sometimes far apart. Pick one, label it on the chart, and don't mix them. For the rest of this article I'll call the Monday cash-open print the weekly cash open and the Sunday reopen print the Globex weekly open.

Why would any weekly open matter? Some traders reference it throughout the week, so it may attract attention. That's an assumption. Whether price reacts around it more than around arbitrary levels is something you can measure.

Classifying the Monday Gap

The gap is the distance between Friday's regular session close and Monday's open. Use the same Friday reference every time (the 4:00pm ET cash close or the futures settlement, whichever you chose). I'd sort gaps into three rough groups so you know what plan to pick, not to predict the outcome.

• Small (roughly 0 to 5 ES points): there's little context from the gap. Trade your normal levels.
• Medium (roughly 5 to 15 points): there's a gap-fill idea to consider, meaning price returning to Friday's close.
• Large (over roughly 15 points): usually follows a weekend event or a large move in the Sunday session. A fade can face a sustained move, so waiting for direction to show is a defensible choice.

Those cutoffs are labels I find convenient. They're not statistical boundaries, and I'm not claiming any fill percentage for any of them. The fill rate for medium gaps on Mondays is a testable question, and it's cheap to test.

How to Test Monday Gap Fills

1. Pull front-month continuous ES data from your data vendor. If you build the series yourself, handle contract rolls carefully, because a bad roll merge creates fake gaps.
2. For each Monday, compute the gap from Friday's close to Monday's open and classify it.
3. Define 'filled' in advance, for example price touches Friday's close within the first 90 minutes of the cash session.
4. Record the adverse excursion before the fill, since a fill that first goes 20 points against you isn't a tradable fill with a tight stop.
5. Compare against non-Monday gaps of the same size.

A few years of Mondays is only a couple hundred observations spread across three gap groups, so treat the result as a hint. Add slippage and commissions before calling anything an edge. At $50 per point, a 4 point stop is $200 per ES contract, and wide opening spreads can make the realized loss larger.

Marking Reference Levels

On Monday, chart the prior week's high and low, Friday's high and low, and whichever weekly open you chose. If the weekly cash open sits above price on Tuesday after a pullback, it may be a place where you decide whether the week's direction is intact. These are decision points. I don't treat them as support or resistance that must hold.

KPL levels join the map after the open. They're fixed reference prices anchored to the regular-session opening print, and the standard ES/NQ map has four levels. Since the anchor is the 9:30am ET print, you can't have completed anchored KPLs before it, and they don't move after. See the KPL strategy page for the method.

The First 30 Minutes

The opening minutes have wide spreads and rapid order imbalance. I avoid entries in the first five to ten minutes. The opening 30-minute high and low (9:30 to 10:00am ET) are easy to mark and some traders watch them as the week continues. A reasonable entry framework is to wait for the first test of a KPL level after things calm down, the first pullback to VWAP after a directional push, or a clearly structured gap fill attempt. Define the stop first, then see if the size fits.

A Short Monday Routine

On Sunday evening, mark last week's high and low and note scheduled releases for the week. Before the open, check Globex action, measure the gap against your chosen Friday close, and look at the 8:30am ET calendar. Decide your plan from the gap group: small gap, trade the session as usual; medium gap, consider a fill plan with a pre-set stop; large gap, wait for direction. Write the plan down before the open so you aren't improvising when several setups appear at once.

Common Monday Mistakes

Entering the gap direction on the first tick, ignoring the weekly chart while trading a one-minute pattern into a major prior-week level, and sizing up because the open feels active. Larger early-session ranges mean your normal stop distance may get hit by noise, so I'd use smaller size or a wider stop sized to hold the same dollar risk. Journal every Monday and compare it against your numbers, not against how it felt.