The NQ's US session: 3:30 pm to 10 pm
An index of seven stocks: the weights, and the aggregate book you cannot see
The Nasdaq-100 has a hundred names, but the NQ is, in practice, the future of about ten of them. Understanding this concentration is understanding why the NQ book sometimes moves without any order having a visible reason in the book itself.
The concentration, in orders of magnitude
The index is weighted by float-adjusted market cap, with capping rules that limit the weight of the largest names and trigger, when exceeded, a special rebalance (there was one in July 2023). Weights change every day with prices and are reviewed quarterly. In October 2026, the orders of magnitude are as follows, to be rechecked on Nasdaq's site before making a rule of them:
The rest of this lesson is for students
- The aggregate book
- What changes depending on who leads
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