Stock Market
By James Thorp
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What happened. Can Wall Street actually run all night? The SEC thinks it's worth asking.
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The historical context. The push for longer hours has roots going back further than most people remember.
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Why it matters. The case for 24-hour trading isn't complicated. Investors in Tokyo, Frankfurt, and São Paulo…
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What to watch. The SEC's September discussions are the obvious thing to track.
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Can Wall Street actually run all night? The SEC thinks it's worth asking. The agency has scheduled discussions for September to look seriously at whether major stock exchanges…
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It's not a fringe idea anymore. Crypto markets never close, retail investors trade at midnight, and global capital doesn't really respect the 9:30 a.m. bell.
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The push for longer hours has roots going back further than most people remember. In the late 1990s, electronic trading platforms — Instinet, Archipelago — cracked open the door…
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And then crypto happened. Bitcoin and Ethereum don't sleep. Neither does Solana or any other digital asset trading on global venues.
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The SEC discussions in September aren't coming out of nowhere. They're basically the institutional acknowledgment that the old schedule — built for a world of floor traders and…
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The case for 24-hour trading isn't complicated. Investors in Tokyo, Frankfurt, and São Paulo shouldn't have to wait for New York to open to trade U.S. equities.
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But there's a real cost side to this that doesn't get talked about enough. Financial institutions would need new staffing models. Risk desks don't just run themselves at 3 a.m.
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Related: SEC Sets September 17 Roundtable to Push 24-Hour U.S. Stock Market Trading
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And there's a psychological angle too. Traders are already burned out. Extended hours means more screen time, more decisions, more fatigue — and fatigue in markets tends to…
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Volatility is the other question nobody can fully answer yet. The optimistic view says spreading trading across 24 hours smooths out the sharp moves that happen when news drops…
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The SEC's September discussions are the obvious thing to track. A green light — even a conditional one — would send a signal to regulators in London, Tokyo, and Frankfurt that…
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