Bitcoin’s daily and weekly close, and how CME books the weekend

The UTC day behind BTC-USD

Yahoo Finance lists BTC-USD with the time zone UTC and an offset of zero, and every daily bar it returns starts at 00:00 UTC. The open is the first price after midnight UTC, the close the final price before the next midnight UTC, and the high and low are the extremes in between. Because nothing pauses, each day’s open is, to within a few dollars, the previous day’s close: on Monday 12 October 2026 the bar opened at 83,679.47, the same figure as Sunday 11 October’s close.

Midnight UTC is 8 p.m. in New York during US daylight time, 1 a.m. in London during British Summer Time, and 8 a.m. in Singapore or Hong Kong. A chart set to a local time zone cuts the same 24 hours of trading at a different point, so its daily candle has a different open, high, low and close from the UTC candle with the same date. Neither is wrong. They describe different windows.

The same applies to weeks. For this piece we define a bitcoin week as Monday 00:00 UTC to Sunday 24:00 UTC, so the weekly open is Monday’s UTC open, the weekly close is Sunday’s UTC close, and the high and low are the extremes of the seven daily bars. A chart that starts its week on Sunday or in a local time zone draws different weekly levels.

Six UTC weeks built from daily bars

The table applies that definition to the six complete UTC weeks from 7 September to 18 October 2026. The change is the weekly close minus the weekly open. For the week of 12 to 18 October: 82,017.60 − 83,679.47 = −1,661.87, and −1,661.87 ÷ 83,679.47 = −1.99%.

Two features of a 24/7 market show up in the table. First, the weekly open is the previous week’s close: the week of 12 October opened at 83,679.47, the close of Sunday 11 October. Second, weekends can set the week’s extremes. The high of the week of 14 September, 81,911.14, came on Saturday 19 September, so a chart that only shows weekdays would not carry that level at all.

How CME settles and dates its Bitcoin futures

CME’s Bitcoin futures contract is for 5 bitcoin, priced against the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate, and is cash settled. CME’s contract page now lists Globex trading as 24/7, apart from maintenance windows from 4:00 to 4:02 p.m. Central Time (CT) on weekdays and from 2:00 to 4:00 a.m. CT on Saturdays. CME’s cryptocurrency page dates its notice of the start of 24/7 crypto trading 28 May 2026.

The daily settlement, the official end-of-day price used for margin, is not the last trade before midnight. CME’s settlement procedure takes the volume-weighted average price of lead-month trades between 14:59:00 and 15:00:00 CT; if nothing trades in that minute, it uses the midpoint of the bid and ask, and if there is no two-sided market, a formula based on the reference rate. Chicago is on daylight time (UTC−5) in October, so 15:00 CT is 20:00 UTC, four hours before the UTC day ends.

The second rule matters more for weekends. CME says all weekend or holiday trading from Friday evening through Sunday evening carries the trade date of the following business day, with clearing and settlement processed then. So there is no Saturday or Sunday settlement. CME’s settlement report for the October 2026 contract shows trade dates of Friday 16 October (settle 81,600) and Monday 19 October (settle 81,830), and nothing for 17 or 18 October. Yahoo’s BTC=F daily series has the same shape: weekday bars only, with Monday’s bar covering the weekend as well. Holidays work the same way. There is no BTC=F bar for Labor Day, Monday 7 September; trading that day belongs to Tuesday 8 September.

Four weekends, spot and futures

For spot, we measure the weekend as Friday’s UTC close to Sunday’s UTC close. From Friday 2 October to Sunday 4 October 2026: 86,480.30 − 84,497.21 = +1,983.09, and 1,983.09 ÷ 84,497.21 = +2.35%.

For futures, the nearest equivalent in daily data is Friday’s BTC=F close to Monday’s, because Monday’s trade date contains the weekend. That change also contains most of Monday itself, up to 15:00 CT. The weekend of 18 to 20 September shows the difference. Spot moved +0.30% from Friday’s close to Sunday’s, but BTC=F rose from 81,330 to 86,590, or +5,260 (+6.47%), from Friday to Monday. Most of that came on Monday 21 September: spot rose from Sunday’s 81,142.61 to 86,602.91 at the end of Monday’s UTC day, +5,460.30 (+6.73%).

We left out the weekend of 25 to 28 September. CME’s rules end trading in a contract on the last Friday of its month, which was 25 September, so Friday’s and Monday’s BTC=F bars may come from different contract months. Comparisons across that roll mix two instruments; our piece on contract months and roll dates at /articles/futures-contract-months-rolls-and-roll-dates explains the mechanics.

The “CME gap” after 24/7 trading

Before CME moved its crypto futures to 24/7 trading, they were closed at weekends, while spot bitcoin kept moving. On a futures chart that left a jump between Friday’s final price and the first price of the new week, widely called the “CME gap”. Some traders track whether price later returns to the Friday level. We make no claim about how often that happens.

With weekend trading booked to Monday, the jump on a daily chart is now the difference between Friday’s settlement and the first trade of Monday’s trade date, which CME’s FAQ places on Friday evening. Its size also depends on which source is drawing the chart. For the weekend of 16 to 19 October, Yahoo’s BTC=F bar shows a Monday open of 81,160, which is 81,160 − 81,600 = −440 (−0.54%) against Friday’s close. CME’s own settlement report lists the open for the 19 October trade date as 80,850, a difference of 80,850 − 81,600 = −750 (−0.92%). Same contract and same weekend, two “gaps”. We do not know how Yahoo assigns the opening price of a futures bar, which is one more reason to say which source a level comes from.

Why one day has several closes

Friday 16 October 2026 is a good example. Yahoo’s BTC-USD close was 81,500.80, the final price before midnight UTC. Yahoo’s BTC=F close was 81,600, which matched CME’s published settlement for the October contract that day; it was fixed at 15:00 CT, four hours earlier. On the two dates we checked, 16 and 19 October, Yahoo’s BTC=F close was the CME settlement rather than a later trade. The two numbers differ for at least three reasons:

• Clock: midnight UTC against 15:00 Chicago time, so four hours of trading separate them in October and five after US clocks change.
• Venue and index: Yahoo’s spot series is an aggregate it labels “CCC”, while CME futures trade on Globex and are tied to the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate.
• Instrument: a futures contract with a fixed expiry is a different product from spot bitcoin, and the gap between the two prices is a subject of its own, which we leave to a separate piece.

What this means for levels on a chart

Levels such as “last week’s close”, “Friday’s close” or “the weekly high” only mean something alongside the series and the clock behind them. A weekly close at Sunday midnight UTC, a weekly close at the last CME settlement on Friday, and a weekly close on a chart set to New York time are three different prices. The weekly high can also move: Saturday 19 September’s high sits in the week of 14 September on a UTC spot chart, but CME books Saturday trading to Monday 21 September, so on a futures chart it belongs to the following week. Our piece on funding rates, open interest and 24/7 ranges at /articles/crypto-perpetual-funding-rates-open-interest-and-24-7-atr-sizing covers perpetual swaps, and /articles/cme-bitcoin-futures-positioning-cftc-tff-report covers who holds CME positions.

How to check these numbers

Open the BTC-USD history page on Yahoo Finance with daily frequency; the dates are UTC days. Take Monday’s open, the highest high and lowest low from Monday to Sunday, and Sunday’s close to rebuild any week in the first table. For futures, open BTC=F on Yahoo and the Settlements tab of CME’s Bitcoin futures page, choose a trade date, and compare the settle column with Yahoo’s close. CME’s contract specifications and its 24/7 trading page set out the maintenance windows and the trade-date rule for weekends and holidays. Our /markets page shows bitcoin alongside other assets, with the source and date of each close.