23×5 stock exchange traders? This couldn’t have happened a century ago, but it will happen before the end of the year.
Sleep is unproductive and a waste of time
If you were on FriendFeed before Facebook bought it, you probably heard Louis Gray utter that sentence. But even in 2010, Gray was having second thoughts.
“I’m not 22 years old any more, like I was in 1999, when there was little keeping me from being 100 percent dedicated to the job. Now, staying a few extra hours at the office, or embedded in my laptop at home, takes time away from my wife and the twins. While I wouldn’t exchange them for anything, I do sometimes get jealous at the opportunity some Valley leaders have to feed the fire in their belly to achieve and achieve.”
Now the 2010 version of Louis Gray could have been active all night AND returned to his family. The solution was to hire an Indian, with roughly 12 hours’ time difference from Silicon Valley.
Of course you can achieve 24 hour coverage without a human by employing a bot to do the work while you sleep. But those bots (or, in the old terms, “algorithmic trading”) are restricted in what they can do and can’t do.
But some sort of help, human or non-human, is necessary. If you wanted to trade on the New York Stock Exchange in the 1920s, you had to have someone in New York. Maybe you were in Chicago, but you had to contact New York to execute the trade. There wasn’t really a call for someone in Korea to buy American stocks.
The 2026 financial markets require 23×5 stock exchange trading
There is now. The worldwide economy and its stock exchanges are interconnected. As the University of Iowa reminds us, “An investor in Seoul may be buying while someone in Des Moines is selling.”
To facilitate that, closing the stock markets at 1:00 pm Pacific Time will soon become a thing of the past.
“Starting in early December, the U.S. stock market will move toward an expanded 23×5 trading schedule — open roughly 23 hours a day, five days a week, with a one-hour daily break for system maintenance — marking ‘the most significant expansion of trading hours for U.S. national securities exchanges in decades,’ [Professor Bidisha] Chakrabarty said.”
Chakrabarty clarifies that this is not entirely a new thing, but recognizes what has already been going on with after-hours trading. This merely formalizes that process, and is expected to result in greater night-time trading activity as this becomes normal. Especially from international traders.
“There are certainly some benefits to a 23×5 trading schedule. For example, investors in Tokyo, Frankfurt and other parts of the world will have greater opportunities to trade U.S. stocks during their own waking hours. Investors who want to respond to important news in the evening will not necessarily have to wait until the next morning. And when information is incorporated into prices sooner, markets may be able to reflect that information more quickly.”
But…and there’s always a but…
“We can extend the trading day but cannot just assume that every piece of the financial system underneath it is ready to operate identically around the clock.”
System maintenance. Cybersecurity protection. You need to run and schedule these with the full knowledge that the system won’t shut down at 1pm Pacific.
Which is why everyone is preparing now.
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