COMEX · GC · MGC
GC futures: COMEX gold
COMEX gold futures are the most widely traded gold futures contract. One contract is 100 troy ounces, so each ten-cent tick is worth $10 and a one-dollar move in the price of gold is worth $100.
- GC tick value
- $10.00
- $0.10 per troy ounce
- GC per point
- $100
- $1.00 per ounce
- MGC tick value
- $1.00
- Micro Gold
- Round trip, in R
- 0.041 R
- At a 0.8-ATR stop, screening engine
GC contract specifications
| Specification | GC · Gold | MGC · Micro Gold |
|---|---|---|
| Contract unit | 100 troy ounces | 10 troy ounces |
| Exchange | COMEX | COMEX |
| Tick size | $0.10 per troy ounce | $0.10 per troy ounce |
| Tick value | $10.00 | $1.00 |
| Value of a point | $100 | $10 |
| Settlement | Physically delivered | Physically delivered |
- Trading hours
- Sunday to Friday, 6:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. ET on CME Globex, with a daily halt from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET.
- GC contract months
- Most active: February, April, June, August, October, December (G, J, M, Q, V, Z)
- GC last trading day
- The third-to-last business day of the contract month.
Exchange rules as published, checked 22 September 2026. Holidays shorten the hours, and the exchange’s own calendar is the authority on any single date.
What a move in GC is worth
Both GC contracts, by points, ticks or entry and exit. For every contract at once, use the tick value calculator; to size a position, the position size calculator.
One point on GC is $1.00 per ounce. Use a minus sign for a loss.
Profit or loss, one contract: $1,000.00
Gold (GC), COMEX: 100 troy ounces. Before commissions and slippage.
How GC trades
Gold trades the Globex week like everything else on this list, but its active hours start earlier than the index contracts'. London's morning is under way by 3:00 a.m. ET, and the heaviest trading runs from the New York open to COMEX's 1:30 p.m. ET settlement. U.S. data at 8:30 a.m. ET, Federal Reserve decisions and the dollar are its scheduled drivers.
GC is physically delivered, and only some months carry the volume: February, April, June, August, October and December. The active contract rolls about every two months, before its delivery period begins.
GC or MGC?
Micro Gold (MGC) is 10 troy ounces: $1 a tick and $10 per one-dollar move, one tenth of GC. It follows the same price and is physically delivered as well, so it rolls on the same schedule.
What the research record says about GC
Gold is screened on its contract set from March 2022 onward, and a round trip at the menu's 0.8-ATR stop on 30-minute bars costs 0.041 R, against 0.012 R on NQ. Its paired gate is silver: the two metals share buyers and drivers, so silver's move can be required to confirm gold's.
Gold streams were part of the 64-stream test that found ranking candidate strategies by return-to-drawdown ratio has no out-of-sample content. Rank on return and correlation, and let the portfolio shape the drawdown.
Screening an idea on GC
An idea on GC is written in the Strategy Language on its own bars, in the regular session: time bars from one minute to a week, or bars that are not time bars. Those are point-and-figure, kagi and line break, drawn from 1-minute closes at any size; their signals come from the bars and their fills from the underlying 1-minute prices.
It can read 62 indicators (moving averages; oscillators such as RSI, Stochastic, MACD and CCI; volatility measures and bands such as ATR, Bollinger and Keltner; volume studies with VWAP; trend studies such as ADX and Supertrend; and community lines in their non-repainting versions); session levels such as the opening range and the prior day's high and low; and the clock and the calendar of scheduled releases; it enters at the market, on a stop or at a limit, and exits by its stop, its target, a trailing stop, a time limit or a condition.
Held overnight on day or week bars of the whole Globex session, a rule on GC is a swing screen, read on GC’s daily tape from February 2020 and graded candidate, promising, doubtful or dead rather than judged gate by gate. A position held overnight can open beyond its stop, so a loss can be larger than the stop you set.
The cost figures on this page are the menu's, at a 0.8-ATR stop on 30-minute bars: a screen written in the Strategy Language pays the same round trip for every contract it enters, and what that is in R depends on the stop you write, or on the ATR of its bars when you write none.
The menu, which the desk still offers beside the language, builds an idea on GC from the tape's own order-flow delta or close location in range, or one of 66 external legs in 8 families, with SI (silver) available as its paired gate.
- Market breadth 16
- Up / down volume 8
- Relative breadth 5
- Participation 2
- Volatility term structure 2
- Scheduled events 3
- Contract roll phase 3
- Technical indicators 27
Generated from the ledger, measured 28 October 2026. These describe specifications screened, not strategies traded.
From the research record
- SettledPicking the strategy with the best return-to-drawdown ratioReturn persists weakly out of sample and the drawdown ratio does not, so rank on return and correlation and let the portfolio shape the drawdown.
- SettledFiltering a signal by a state variable from the same barsRegime conditioning works when the state is exogenous and lagged; measured on the same bars it becomes arithmetic.
- SettledLetting walk-forward optimization choose your stopIt gravitates to the tightest stop whenever the objective restates the parameter, so score in dollars at constant risk instead.
GC futures questions
- What is the tick value of gold futures?
- On GC one tick is $0.10 per troy ounce, worth $10 per contract. On Micro Gold (MGC) the same tick is worth $1.
- How much is a $10 move in gold worth on a futures contract?
- $1,000 per GC contract and $100 per MGC contract.
- What are the gold futures trading hours?
- GC trades on CME Globex from 6:00 p.m. ET on Sunday to 5:00 p.m. ET on Friday, with a one-hour halt from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET every weekday. The daily settlement is at 1:30 p.m. ET.
- Which gold futures month is the active one?
- Volume concentrates in February, April, June, August, October and December. Traders move to the next of those months before the current one enters its delivery period, and each stops trading on the third-to-last business day of its month.
- What is the difference between GC and MGC?
- MGC is one tenth of GC: 10 ounces against 100, $1 a tick against $10. Both follow the same price and both are physically delivered.
Screen an idea on GC
Put a trading idea on GC through seven gates written down before the run, from real per-fill costs to a drift null and a walk-forward. The verdict comes back in seconds.