At WFIC 2026: What It Takes to Make Extended Trading Hours Work

The trading day is getting longer. On December 6, Nasdaq plans to add a 9pm to 4am ET session and move U.S. equities to 23 hours a day, five days a week. Cboe has SEC approval to run EDGX on the same schedule. Alternative trading systems already operate overnight, and derivatives venues, prediction markets and tokenized products offer markets referencing traditional assets around the clock.

Longer hours reach every part of market structure: data, infrastructure, regulation, liquidity, risk management, client support and execution quality.

That was the subject of WFIC 2026's panel "When the Bell Never Tolls: The Reality of Extended Trading Hours." John Ikel, Executive Director and Head of Exchange Data Licensing at Morgan Stanley, moderated a discussion with Scott Fitzpatrick of TraditionData, Matt Fuchs of OTC Markets Group, Michael James of Douro Labs and Pyth Network, James McKeone of Nasdaq and Keith Petersen of Cboe.

Global Investors Are Driving Demand

The case for extended trading begins with a straightforward change in investor behavior. Capital is global, information moves continuously, and investors increasingly expect markets to reflect that reality.

James McKeone brought an Asia-Pacific perspective to the conversation, highlighting the demand from investors who want access to U.S. equities during their own business hours. For these investors, extended trading is not only about convenience. It is also about being able to respond to company news, macroeconomic announcements, and market-moving events without waiting for the next U.S. session.

Nasdaq’s planned 23/5 schedule is a major step in that direction. Subject to industry readiness and applicable regulatory conditions, the exchange expects to introduce a new overnight session from 9pm to 4am ET on December 6, 2026. Combined with existing pre-market and post-market sessions, this would create a trading day that runs for 23 hours, five days a week.

The opportunity is therefore larger than moving activity from one part of the day to another. Extended hours can bring new participants into the market, particularly in regions where traditional U.S. trading hours fall outside the local working day.

Overnight Markets Offer an Early Test of Access and Fragmentation

While major exchanges are preparing for the next phase of extended trading, other venues have already been operating in this environment.

Matt Fuchs described OTC Markets Group’s experience with overnight trading through MOON ATS and OTC Overnight. These platforms provide access to U.S. and international securities beyond traditional market hours, giving broker-dealers and investors practical experience with the opportunities and challenges of overnight activity.

One lesson from this early market is the value of competition and redundancy. Multiple venues can give participants more confidence that they will be able to access markets and manage positions when one venue is unavailable or does not offer the liquidity they need.

That does not mean fragmentation is harmless. If liquidity, pricing, and market information become too dispersed, execution can become more difficult and market participants may struggle to understand where activity is taking place. The challenge is to create a broader market without creating a less coherent one.

Longer Hours Put the Entire Operating Model Under Pressure

Scott Fitzpatrick offered the perspective of a business already familiar with operating across global markets for much of the day. TraditionData’s experience illustrates that longer hours place pressure on every part of the operating model.

Technology teams have fewer windows for maintenance. Customer-support teams need to respond across time zones. Firms must navigate different regulatory regimes and reporting requirements. Liquidity profiles change throughout the day, as do spreads, participation, and risk.

A 2am market is not simply a thinner version of the daytime market. It may have different participants, different liquidity characteristics, and different reasons for trading. Market infrastructure has to account for those differences rather than assuming that one set of daytime conventions will apply everywhere.

Cboe’s planned expansion of EDGX toward a 23/5 schedule reflects the same industry-wide focus on implementation, resilience, and market protections.

Always-On Markets Need Resilient, Transparent Data

The panel also made clear that extended trading hours create a market-data problem as much as an exchange problem.

When markets operate across venues and time zones, participants need data that is timely, reliable, and clear about its limitations. They need to understand not only the price being reported, but also how that price was formed and how much agreement exists among the underlying contributors.

Michael James brought this perspective from Pyth. Pyth provides real-time market data across asset classes, sourced from institutional publishers and delivered through one API. That model is designed for a financial system in which data is consumed by exchanges, trading venues, applications, prediction markets, and AI systems, many of which do not operate according to a traditional opening bell and closing bell.

“Market data does not stop when the traditional session ends. If markets are going to operate around the clock, the data layer has to be equally resilient, with data from multiple contributors, clear signals about uncertainty, and an experience that works for institutions and applications at any hour.”

Michael James, Head of Institutional at Douro Labs, contributor to Pyth Network

Pyth’s data model also includes confidence intervals. These are designed to communicate the level of dispersion among publisher inputs, rather than presenting every aggregate price as if it carried the same degree of certainty. That distinction matters in overnight and cross-venue markets, where liquidity and participation can vary significantly.

For market participants, this type of information can support risk management and better interpretation of conditions across venues. For applications and AI systems, it provides machine-readable context alongside the price itself.

Extended Trading Will Evolve Beyond the Launch

The panelists broadly rejected the idea that the market will change overnight simply because a new session begins. The core daytime session will remain important for primary liquidity and price discovery and overnight activity will develop gradually as investors, brokers, exchanges, data providers, and technology vendors improve the user experience.

That experience will matter. Participants will choose the venues and products that make it easiest to trade, manage risk, understand pricing, and move between markets. Traditional exchanges, ATSs, derivatives venues, and data providers will not necessarily be competing for exactly the same users. In many cases, their markets may complement one another.

The most important question is whether the industry can make those different venues work together effectively.

Extended trading hours will create more access to global markets. They will also create more data, more venues, and more complexity. The firms that succeed will be the ones that can turn that complexity into a market experience that is transparent, resilient, and easy to use.

The bell may stop defining when markets operate, but it will not stop the industry from having to answer the harder question: What makes an always-on market work well?