If you trade ES from London, the New York open came an hour early this week. Chicago changed nothing; UK clocks went back a week before US clocks.
What moved, and what didn't
ES trades on CME Globex, and CME runs on Central time. The week opens Sunday at 17:00 Central and closes Friday at 16:00 Central, with a one hour halt every afternoon from 16:00 to 17:00. The New York cash session is still 09:30 to 16:00 Eastern. None of that moved.
What moved is the gap between your clock and theirs. The UK set its clocks back on Sunday, October 25. The US sets its clocks back on Sunday, November 1. For that one week, London is four hours ahead of New York instead of five hours.
So the cash open lands at 13:30 London time this week. From Monday, November 2, it's back at 14:30. Most of Europe changed on the same Sunday as the UK, so the same one hour shift applies there too.
What NinjaTrader does with it
NinjaTrader keeps two times apart. The trading hours template, under Tools > Trading Hours, holds the session in the exchange's own time zone. For ES that's Central time, so the session break and the daily halt stay where they belong. The time your chart prints comes from Tools > Options > General.
That means your bars are right. The 5 minute bar that opens at 09:30 Eastern is the same bar it was last week. Only the label on the time axis reads an hour earlier. Set NinjaTrader to New York time and nothing on the chart moves at all, though every time on it is then New York time, all year.
What can go wrong is anything you typed in your own local time:
- an alarm or calendar reminder for the open
- a custom session template written in London time
- an indicator input that takes a fixed local time, such as a session start
Check each of those once this week, and again after November 1.
A quick check
Open a 5 minute ES chart and find the first bar of this week's cash session. NinjaTrader labels each bar with its close time, so that bar reads 09:35 in New York. If you trade from London and it reads 13:35, NinjaTrader is doing its job. If the session break looks an hour off, check that chart's trading hours template first.
Short answers
Did the ES trading hours change?
No. CME keeps them on Central time, and Central and Eastern both change on the same day, November 1.
Why does the chart show the open an hour early?
If NinjaTrader is set to your local time zone, the chart follows your local clock, and that clock changed a week before the US one. It's back to normal on November 2.
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