THE LEXICON · THE NQ OVERNIGHT RANGE
The NQ overnight range
The NQ overnight dealing range is the high and the low Nasdaq-100 futures print between 6:45 and 10:03 pm New York time, measured on 1-minute data. It is a narrower object than the overnight high and low most charts label, and the difference matters.
Two things called the overnight range
Ask for the overnight range on NQ and most traders mean the full Globex session: everything from the 6:00 pm reopen to the 9:30 am cash open, summarized as the overnight high and low. The dealing range is a slice of that session — 18:45 to 22:03 ET — and it is finished more than eleven hours before the cash open. The two are different objects with different highs and lows. Say which one is meant.
Why that window
The window opens forty-five minutes after the Globex reopen, once the first stretch of the new session has traded. It spans the Tokyo cash open — 9:00 in Japan, which is 8:00 pm New York time during US daylight saving and 7:00 pm in winter — and the Hong Kong and Shanghai opens at 9:30 local, 9:30 or 8:30 pm New York. It closes at 22:03, and the minute is not a rounding. In 1-minute terms the last bar inside the window is the one stamped 22:02.
None of that makes the hours magic, and the method does not claim it does. The claim is smaller: the window is fixed in advance, so the range is complete before it is used and identical for everyone who measures it.
Why 1-minute data
The window's edges fall on minutes that most chart timeframes do not respect. A 15-minute bar that opens at 22:00 contains fourteen minutes of trade after the window has closed. An hourly bar that opens at 18:00 contains forty-five minutes before it opened. Read the high and low off those bars and the range quietly includes prices that are not part of it. One minute is the coarsest common resolution on which both 18:45 and 22:03 are bar boundaries, so it is the resolution the range is measured on — whatever timeframe the chart is then read on.
How it forms
The overnight book is thin next to the cash session. Moves print on less volume and unwind on less, and a single burst can set the high or the low in a few minutes. Some nights the window closes on a narrow range and some on a violent one; the width is whatever the session printed. From the finished range come the rest of the night's numbers: equilibrium at the midpoint, a bias from the side of it price closed on, the pocket and the objective at the far end.
What the record shows
Every night the range is published on the first pass after 22:03 ET, before the session it measures, and scored after it on THE PRINTS. The question is narrow: did price reach the far end on the bias side before the opposite extreme broke? Beside every answer sits the rate a random walk would produce from the same starting point.
As of this writing, the objective-first rate matches its random-walk baseline. Stated plainly, the record so far shows no edge over geometry. It is published anyway, and no session is removed; a record that only appears when it flatters is not a record. A stricter event — price pulling back into the pocket first, then reaching the objective — is tallied separately from mid-August 2026 against its own, much lower baseline.
How it gets misread
The common error is treating the full-session overnight high and low and the 18:45 to 22:03 range as interchangeable. The second is reading the range off the chart timeframe instead of 1-minute data. The third belongs to roll weeks: when the front-month contract changes, a continuous chart can step by the calendar spread, which is not price. The record marks those sessions unscored rather than guessing.
Where it lives
The range is the base object; these entries measure from it.
THE NQ DEALING RANGE CLOSES AT 22:03 ET AND PUBLISHES MINUTES LATER, BEFORE THE SESSION — SCORED AFTER, EITHER WAY. SEE THE RECORD → · AUDIT THE CHAIN →