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Trading Hours

Trading Hours in TWS



Trading Hours

Regular Trading Hours

Regular Trading Hours (RTH) refers to the regular trading session hours available for an instrument on a specific exchange or market center. Regular hours vary between instruments, exchanges, and days of the week. For example, the Regular Trading Session hours for NYSE-listed stocks runs from 09:30 EST – 16:00 EST Monday through Friday.

Regular Trading Hours may be a subset of the instrument’s total trading hours. For example, for NYSE-listed stocks the Total Available Hours are 04:00 EST – 20:00 EST.

We display all available trading hours for every instrument in TWS.

rth contract description

Liquid Trading Hours

For products that don’t officially list Regular Trading Hours - for example the E-mini S&P 500 futures on Globex which trades from 17:00 – 15:15 the following day, then again from 15:30 – 16:00 - IB has determined "Liquid Trading Hours" during which the contract has historically been more liquid, and will only allow stop-variant orders on Globex futures to trigger during this LTH time period.


View Trading Hours in TWS

To see trading hours, right-click a data line for an instrument in any tool, and select Contract Info then Description. The Trading Hours section on the bottom left shows the regular session and total trading hours available. Click the Calendar link to display a pop-up with today’s hours highlighted, and the hours for the entire current week.

View Trading Hours in TWS



Outside Regular Hours

TWS displays a small clock icon in the Time in Force field, with a mouse-over description of the currently indicated trading hours for an order for instruments that support filling or triggering of orders outside of regular or liquid hours. Hold your mouse over the icon to see hours during which the order will be active.


Click the icon to view and select other valid times-in-force and "outside hours" options for the order.

Outside Regular Hours

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outside hours



For Globex futures, you can specify that you want to allow the order to trigger outside of Liquid Trading Hours by checking the "Trigger outside RTH" checkbox.

Trigger outside RTH



The new mouse-over description reflects your selection and the clock icon shows a yellow warning triangle to notify you that the order is eligible to fill or trigger outside its regular hours.

fill time icon



Setting "Outside Hours" for Orders as a Preset

You can elect to allow an order to trigger or fill outside hours as the default using Order Presets.

Outside Regular Hours as a Default

Use Order Presets to tell TWS to always enable "Fill outside RTH" on, for example, all US stock orders or all futures orders. To set this in a preset, open Global Configuration and in the Presets section select Stocks. Check "Allow order to be activated, triggered or filled outside of regular trading hours (if available)." Click OK to save the setting.

The next time you initiate a stock order, you’ll see that the clock icon includes the yellow warning triangle to indicate it is eligible to be active outside the regular session. You can disable this by unchecking the box from the Time in Force drop down.

rth preset