The Industry Keeps Talking About 24/5 Trading, But Does It Actually Want It?

A panel convened to discuss the engineering of always-on markets spent most of its time on a more basic question: does anyone actually want them? The appetite for round-the-clock equity trading, it turned out, is far harder to find than the conversation about it would suggest.

The discussion was moderated by Steve Hamilton, independent non-executive director and market structure consultant, with James Baugh, managing director and head of European market structure at TD Securities, Paul Millward, head of 24X product and EMEA at 24 Exchange, and Richard Bell, head of execution technology at Nickel Digital Asset Management.

The Demand Nobody Will Name

The industry has more or less decided it does not want 24-hour trading, one panellist suggested, while accepting that it is coming anyway. Several speakers shared that discomfort. A poll at a recent industry event was recalled as showing 78% of respondents opposed to 24/7 markets, and in Europe the case looks weaker still: little of the overnight interest US markets see from Asia, no equivalent of the mega-cap technology names that anchor American flow, and no obvious group pushing for longer hours.

Others argued the demand is real and already visible, just not being met in regulated venues. Retail investors will pick up their phones and trade on a Saturday afternoon, this line ran, and if a regulated exchange is closed they will trade a perpetual future on a crypto platform instead – taking exposure to the price move through a derivative rather than the stock itself. On this view the question is not whether out-of-hours trading happens, but whether it happens inside a regulated environment or outside one.

The clearest evidence came from the institutional end, where it was least expected. Early take-up of extended-hours access, the panel heard, had been led not by the retail-facing brokers many assumed would move first, but by institutional clients – which the panel read as a sign the demand was genuine, since institutions tend to move only when their own clients are pushing them. The likeliest reason: a need to manage risk when news breaks outside trading hours.

If the demand is real, the next question is who is actually driving it. One argument held that the pressure comes less from end investors than from the platforms and liquidity providers that profit from more hours in which to make markets – demand manufactured by one side of the trade and dressed up as client need. That tension, between genuine investor appetite and commercial self-interest, ran underneath the whole discussion.

A Two-Tier Market, By Default

That prospect drew steady unease about investor protection. If regulated exchanges refuse to serve out-of-hours demand, the argument went, they do not remove it – they hand it to channels that already let retail investors take equity exposure at any hour with far less oversight. A recent enforcement action against an alternative trading system, for supervisory failures involving spoofing and layering in thin overnight conditions, was offered as evidence of what the less-regulated tier already looks like. The safer answer, several panellists agreed, is for regulated venues to be present when that demand arrives, however inconvenient that proves.

For the firms in the middle, that inconvenience is not abstract. Brokers expect to have to provide access to extended-hours activity whether or not clients currently use it. The European pre-market open was offered as a live parallel: desks already keep connectivity that sees little use but has to be ready the moment a portfolio manager wants to act. The optionality has to be built and paid for ahead of the demand that justifies it.

What Continuous Markets Actually Require

Only once that argument had run did the panel reach the resilience question it was convened to address – and the most useful move was to deflate it. Asking how a market achieves zero downtime, one panellist suggested, misses the point. Markets that already run continuously still take maintenance windows: brief, scheduled, every few weeks rather than every day, and they work perfectly well that way. Chasing total availability risks overengineering the problem. The principle should be not letting perfect become the enemy of good.

Resilience, it was suggested, is better understood as removing single points of failure than as eliminating downtime. A recent outage at a major foreign exchange venue spread outward because participants had used it as a single pricing benchmark across their internal systems. With no reference price, they could not validate incoming quotes, and liquidity drained. The lesson was to diversify sources, and regulators are moving the same way: after an earlier outage at a US overnight venue, one regulator was described as requiring firms connecting to such platforms to maintain links to more than one.

Settlement was the final complication. As markets move from T+1 toward T+0 and atomic settlement, the funding cost of continuous trading shifts from post-trade into the front office. A continuously settled market needs funds permanently available at the venue – a discipline familiar from crypto but largely alien to traditional equity workflows. Prefunding without netting, when central bank settlement rails do not run around the clock, looks less like an efficiency than an added cost, and potentially a brake on the very innovations extended trading is meant to enable.

Where This Leaves the Market

Extended trading is coming; how fast and how far, nobody on the panel would say. What that leaves unresolved is who ends up serving the demand. If regulated infrastructure does not move to absorb it, the less-regulated venues will – and whether the funding economics of continuous settlement make the regulated route workable is the question the industry has yet to answer.