The trading day ends at 4 PM CT, and the next one starts at 5 PM CT
Futures don't follow the calendar. The session that opens Sunday at 5:00 PM CT runs almost continuously until Friday at 4:00 PM CT, broken only by a one-hour maintenance halt each weekday afternoon. So a fill at 4:59 PM CT Monday and one at 5:01 PM CT Monday belong to two different trading days, even though your wall clock says the same date.
This is the single most common reason a journal's daily P&L disagrees with a broker statement: the journal bucketed an evening trade into the calendar day it happened on, and the broker bucketed it into the next trading day. ExpectancyIQ uses the 5 PM CT rollover everywhere, so the two agree. The longer explanation is here, including what it does to your win rate by day of week.
Regular trading hours vs the overnight (Globex) session
For equity index futures like ES and NQ, regular trading hours (RTH) are the US stock market session: 9:30 AM ET to 4:00 PM ET (8:30 AM CT to 3:00 PM CT). Everything else on the Globex clock is the overnight session, also called extended trading hours (ETH).
It matters because most of the volume trades during RTH, and the overnight session is usually thinner, with wider spreads and bigger slippage on market orders. If you trade both, the two behave like different markets, so a journal should let you split your results by session instead of blending them into one number. Keep in mind that the 5 PM CT daily rollover sits inside the overnight session: a trading journal that buckets trades by the 5 PM CT session keeps an evening fill with the right trading day.
What the live status does and doesn't cover
The open/closed badge at the top tracks the regular weekly schedule for CME Globex equity index futures. It does not know about holidays — on a holiday it will still show the normal schedule, so use the holiday table above for those days.
Sizing the trades you take in those hours
Once you know the session, the next questions are what a contract is worth and how many to trade — the contract size calculator and the position size calculator handle those, and the futures calculator hub has the tick value of every contract. Contracts nearing expiry roll on a fixed calendar too: see the roll dates.