What are gold futures?

How are gold futures different from spot gold (XAUUSD)?

The COMEX contract is the venue where most institutional gold price discovery happens, and spot XAUUSD tracks it closely. The two differ by the cost of carry, which produces a small and predictable basis rather than any meaningful divergence.

Why do traders watch the futures market?

Futures are exchange-cleared with published volume and open interest, which spot CFDs are not. That transparency is genuinely useful context — futures positioning data describes what large participants are doing, and no equivalent exists for the retail CFD market.

Why do gold futures matter for US traders?

For US-based traders the distinction is not academic. Retail access to spot gold CFDs is restricted in the United States, so futures and futures options are among the routes actually available — one of several reasons the US audience for an MT5 gold bot is largely prop-firm traders. See can US traders use MT5 trading bots.

Gold futures contract specifications

The two contracts most traders use, from CME Group's published specifications:

When does the gold futures market open?

Gold futures open on Sunday at 6:00 p.m. ET and trade around the clock until Friday at 5:00 p.m. ET, stopping for one hour every afternoon from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET (4:00 to 5:00 p.m. CT) for CME Globex's daily break. Spot gold at our own broker pauses at the same moment, and it shows in our data: on the broker's UTC clock the hour with no trading is 21:00 in US summer and 22:00 in US winter, which is 5 p.m. New York time both times.

What is the best time to trade gold futures?

If "best" means most movement, New York's morning. We measured the high-to-low range of every 5-minute bar of spot gold for a year, 70,546 bars from August 2025 to July 2026, and took the median for each hour of the day.

The busiest hour moved about 2.4 times as far as the quietest, while the spread stayed at a median $0.16 almost all day, so trading costs take a much smaller bite in the morning: the spread was 2.3% of a typical 5-minute move at 14:00 UTC and 5.4% at 20:00. These are spot prices from one broker. Futures track spot closely, but futures volume has its own daily pattern, so read the table as a map of when gold moves rather than of futures liquidity. Full data: gold spread and volatility by hour.

How much does one gold futures contract move in a day?

Multiply gold's daily range by the contract size. Over the same year, spot gold's median high-to-low range was $76.12 an ounce, and one day in ten it exceeded $162.62. Per contract:

The range is the distance from the day's high to its low, not a loss anyone necessarily took, but it is the right scale for sizing: on a typical day one GC contract swings more than $7,000 from top to bottom. That is where the Micro contract comes in, and why a daily loss limit on a futures prop firm account binds quickly on the full-size contract.