Crypto glossary
CME gap
A CME gap is a price gap on the chart of CME bitcoin futures, which pause over weekends, between the Friday close and the reopening price.
CME Group's bitcoin futures trade on a schedule set by the exchange and stop over the weekend, while spot bitcoin trades every day. When bitcoin moves during the closure, the futures reopen at a different price from where they closed, leaving an empty space on the chart. Traders call this a CME gap and note its upper and lower bounds.
A popular belief holds that price tends to return to fill these gaps, and analysts often point to unfilled gaps as targets. The idea gained traction because many gaps were filled, sometimes within days, and because CME futures are widely watched as a proxy for institutional positioning in the US.
There is no mechanism that forces a gap to fill. Most price ranges are revisited eventually in a volatile market, which makes the pattern look more reliable than it is, and some gaps remained open for long periods. Trading on gap fills alone ignores the time it may take and the losses possible in between.
Example
CME bitcoin futures close at 68,000 dollars on Friday. Spot BTC rallies to 71,000 over the weekend, so the futures reopen there, leaving a gap that traders expect price to revisit.