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The CME eliminated the 4:15pm ET 15 minute trading pause for equity futures and options effective 2021-06-28. Team BPA continues to use the close of B81 as the day’s RTH close. I continue to wonder why that is. Including the 3 extra bars after the close of cash market trading at 4 pm ET affects EMAs, trend lines and MM targets. In my opinion, since the change, B81 is just another ETH bar from the RTH close to the end of the business day at 5 pm ET and the use of its close as the defintion of the day’s close is completely arbitrary. I imagine that Team BPA wanted to remain consistent with the definition of RTH since before the change. However, in order to better assess the potential significance of the B81 close before and after the change, I looked at the volume of the final minute of B81 . The results are shown below for the 2 year period before and after the change. The scale on both distributions is the same for comparison. To me it’s clear that the market, both humans and machines, place no significance at all on the close of B81. What was the median of the pre-change volume distribution is now an outlier. I think that the close of B90 at 5 pm ET would be a better choice for the close of RTH but I also think that the best choice is the actual close of RTH, the last tick of B78, or perhaps the CME-determined settlement at 4 pm ET. (The CME calculates the volume-weighted average price (“VWAP”) of all trades executed on CME Globex between 15:59:30 and 16:00:00 ET, rounded to the nearest .25 index point.) For my own RTH charts I define RTH as the time that the cash market is open, from 9:30 am to 4 pm ET, 78 bars. Every trader can define the close of the day’s activity in any way they choose but I choose to use 78 bars. Just my 2 cents.