This week, Intercontinental Exchange announced that it is developing a platform for 24/7 trading that offers “instant settlement.”
Round-the-clock trading would be based on digital tokens that reflect the shares of publicly traded companies, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange said in a statement.
Nasdaq, another New York-based stock exchange, could do the same as early as this year, AFP said.
The move is pending approval by federal regulators at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and would amount to a small revolution in the way money moves in U.S. stock markets.
– ‘Waste of time’ –
In the early days of the exchange, investors had to be physically present in Wall Street markets to “stand and shout at each other and wave pieces of paper, and then they had to write down what everyone bought and sold,” Sam Burns, chief strategist at Mill Street Research, told AFP.
That meant “it would be impossible to maintain the pace of operations all day every day,” Burns said.
Digitized transactions can change all that.
After-hours trading has already been on the rise since 2019, exploding since 2024, when the daily average surpassed $61 billion, according to a New York Stock Exchange report from early 2025.
But the appeal remains limited, according to Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University.
“Historically, there is little evidence to support the idea that the benefits of 24-hour trading outweigh the costs,” he said, adding that “there are few market-moving events that occur outside of normal trading hours in New York City.”
“Night trading turned out to be a waste of time,” he said.
Hanke said the real advantage of the NYSE announcement lies in the time needed to complete a trade, a process that typically occurs the next day in most stock markets.
“Reducing the settlement period can be an important competitive advantage,” Hanke said.
– Attract young people and foreigners –
As home to immense market capitalizations, the US market remains the largest in the world, but competition is growing.
Last year, many European indices generated returns that outpaced their U.S. counterparts.
With expanded hours, Wall Street could attract smaller investors and investors from outside America.
Nearly 18 percent of U.S. stocks were owned by non-U.S. holders in 2024, according to the most recent figures available from the U.S. Treasury.
And cryptocurrency trading fans can jump into stocks, said Burns, a strategist at Mill Street Research.
“Many retail investors today, especially younger ones, seem to like the idea of ​​being able to trade stocks all the time in the same way they do cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, whether at night or on the weekends,” Burns said.
“The change is unlikely to take traditional investors off bankers’ schedules because the impacts of any changes are likely to be limited,” Burns added.
“Most institutional investors who trade real money are not really interested in working or trading on the weekends, and the fact is that most banks are still closed on the weekends,” Burns said.