24-Hour Trading Is the Wrong Answer to the Right Problem

For consumers, 24/7 has become a digital right. Streaming, payments, shopping, communication and more areas of our lives work around the clock from anywhere. Investing is the odd one out, still tied to opening hours and business days. Why hasn't investing transitioned to a digital form yet? For the average investor, that is hard to understand.

The industry has heard it. The SEC has set September talks on a move toward 24-hour trading in US equities, with Nasdaq, Cboe and the London Stock Exchange among the venues already pushing longer hours; in London, the plan is a full trading day with only a 30-minute daily break, run through a separate overnight platform that goes into testing this year. On paper this reads as progress, but looking closer reveals that it is a workaround. Making a market truly continuous turns out to be hard, because neither the systems nor the rules were built for it, and of the two, the rules are the easier part to change. Regulators are already moving. The systems are the constraint.

To see why, look at what is actually being stretched. The architecture public markets use today was invented long before the digital era, back when paper was physically moved around. In 1971 NASDAQ famously introduced "electronic trading", essentially removing the need for a trading floor and replacing it with electronic systems. Everything else stayed the same. So electronic trading could not reinvent the market for a digital world back then, because it wasn't around. It did what the tools of its time allowed. The same intermediaries in the same order, the same settlement process that passes each trade through layer after layer before it is final. In effect, it made the paper move faster. Everything accelerated; nothing was rethought. A real leap nevertheless.

The problem is that technological eras are not compatible with each other in many ways, and infrastructure has to be rebuilt with the new technology natively embedded to achieve the full potential. Let me give you a practical analogy: the progress from VHS to DVDs, Blu-ray and then eventually streaming. DVDs had the movie encoded digitally on the disc, but the DVD still required the same value chain and distribution as VHS did. DVDs thus fundamentally had the same restrictions in terms of what you could do. DVDs had regions; you had to go to your local dealer or DVD rental to buy a new movie. Compared to today, it was also expensive. These "analog" properties and user experiences even stayed with Blu-ray being around. It was essentially just a better DVD. Then Netflix came around and managed to stream the same movie from anywhere, at any time and at a fraction of the cost, to any of your devices. None of the previous value chain was required anymore, and that of course made watching nearly everything for €10 a month possible.

Public markets are currently in that DVD/Blu-ray era. The frontends are already digital, but the entire value chain and processes are still "electrified analog". So what is missing is this "streaming" moment that allows markets to transcend the six or more intermediaries, duplicated around the world for different venues, to achieve digital public markets and investing, and to achieve digital experiences such as 24/7 without any ifs and buts and trade-offs.

Around-the-clock trading is a very tough challenge locally, and it becomes even tougher when you want to achieve global 24/7 trading. The reason it is so hard is that liquidity is fragmented on four fronts at once, by venue, by time zone, by asset class, and by border, each silo connected to the next only through intermediaries and delayed settlement. What the investor actually wants is the opposite of that: one global market that spans assets, asset classes and borders, open whenever they are.

It's worth being clear about why this matters, because the purpose of it all has never changed. A public market exists to do one thing, and it has done that one thing for centuries: allocate capital efficiently, move savings to wherever they earn the best return. But the model built to do it was drawn along geographic lines, every country with its own exchanges and trading venues, its own depositories, its own rules, the same value chain duplicated around the globe many times over. For a world in which companies, savers and their money rarely left home, that model served its geographies well. That world is gone. Globalization and digital technology have made companies, investors and capital itself global, and a portfolio built today is global by default. Only the model underneath has stayed national, and in a global world it no longer looks efficient.

Running global investing on that national model is not free: every seam, a wider spread, a wait, a currency conversion, a settlement risk someone carries, skims a little off the top, and the bill lands in the same place every time, the investor's return. It buys them nothing in exchange, no better company, no better price, just more hands the trade passes through. By the technological standards of 2026, a much more efficient and digital investing experience should already be here.

Extended hours don't deliver that experience. They stretch the old machine instead. A separate overnight platform isn't one continuous market, it's a second, thinner pool of liquidity bolted onto the first, which means wider spreads at 3am, price gaps between the day and night books, and more places for the same asset to trade at different values. This isn't hypothetical. On recent NYSE data, spreads in the overnight session run several times wider than in core hours, roughly ninety basis points against twenty. Every one of those is a new cost, not a saved one. The industry is answering fragmentation with more fragmentation.

Here is what extended hours quietly admit. If settlement were instant and liquidity were unified, the question of when the market is open would nearly disappear. Any counterparty anywhere could swap value with any other at any moment and have the trade final on the spot, instead of sitting in a queue until the next business day. You don't need a 24-hour clock if settlement is atomic and the pool is global. The clock only matters because the plumbing is slow.

That is not a problem you can open longer. It sits in the base, and fixing the base is a far larger project than adding a night session, which is exactly why the night session is the tempting answer: it looks like progress and asks nothing structural. It is the smaller question dressed up as the big one.

The same layering shows up on the tokenization side. DTCC completed production trades in July using tokenized securities held inside its existing depository, real engineering progress, but notice what it doesn't change: the depository, the intermediaries, the reconciliation layer all remain. And the depository in question, the DTC, was built in 1973 to tame a paperwork crisis by immobilizing paper share certificates, so tokenizing the records held inside it is a digital surface on an analog-era institution, an optimization of the current architecture, not a rebuild. A stepping stone, not the destination.

Step back, then, and look at what a truly global, always-on market would require. The clock is only one seam of many. Take one simple intention: an investor in Frankfurt moves money from a European ETF into a US stock. That single move crosses two venues, two currencies, two depositories and two settlement cycles, and every layer brings its own intermediaries, its own cut-off times and its own fees. Nothing in that chain cares about opening hours. The friction is there because markets grew up as national silos, each with its own analog-era plumbing, stitched together after the fact rather than built as one system.

The same silos run between asset classes. Equities, bonds, funds and currencies each live on their own rails, so even a plain switch from stocks into bonds becomes two transactions, cash translating in the middle, the spread and the costs paid twice for what is, in the investor's head, one move. And this is not an edge case: most of global trading volumes are reallocation driven, existing money moving between assets rather than new money arriving. That is the true size of the challenge behind global 24/7 trading. The barrier is not one seam but many, geography, time zones and asset classes, each an analog-era silo of its own, and all of them would have to be overcome at once. A night session at a single venue overcomes none of them.

It is great to see that the industry is trying to meet the demand for digital experiences, but the approach of delivering the experiences of the digital era with the foundation of the analog-electronic era will not yield the results everybody is expecting. 24/7 is just the start. There are many more digital properties such as personalization that will not come to fruition until public markets infrastructure has had its streaming moment.