The full nearly-24-hour futures session, including everything outside regular trading hours.
ETH covers the whole Sunday-evening-to-Friday-afternoon window. It is genuinely tradeable — index futures can move hundreds of points overnight on foreign news — but liquidity varies enormously across it.
The practical rule is that bid-ask-spreads widen and depth thins outside the European and US hours, so the same stop distance carries more slippage risk at 2am than at 10am.
Example: ES book depth might show hundreds of contracts per level at 10:30am Eastern and a few dozen at 2:30am, when a 20-lot market order can move the price several ticks.
Original diagrams for the ideas on this page. Illustrative, not real market data.
Slippage on a market order. You click at 20.00, but only 300 shares are resting there, so the rest of the order fills at 20.01, 20.03 and 20.04. The average price paid is 20.02, and that two-cent gap is slippage.The bid-ask spread. Buy orders sit below, sell orders above, and the gap between the best bid (50.01) and best ask (50.04) is the spread you pay to cross. Bar length shows the size resting at each price.
Educational only, not advice. Spotted an error? Post in Site Feedback.