Nasdaq confirms 23-hour trading from December with new overnight session

The Nasdaq announced it will begin trading US stocks for nearly 23 hours a day from Sunday 6 December onwards.

The move, still subject to SEC approval, means Nasdaq's trading day will stretch from Sunday evening to Friday evening with barely a pause.

For European investors, the new window of 9pm to 4am ET will be 3am to 10am CET, meaning Europeans could be trading Nasdaq-listed stocks for almost an entire session before London opens.

Nasdaq already runs extended sessions from 4am to 9:30am, called pre-market session, and 4pm to 8pm ET, named after-hours session, around its core 9:30am to 4pm hours, but access to that early and late trading has largely been exclusive to institutional investors with direct market connections.

Nasdaq president Tal Cohen has framed the expansion as a way to "broaden investor access and expand wealth-building opportunities" for everyone else.

The pitch is also backed by numbers as foreign holdings of US equities reached $17 trillion (€14.6tn) by mid-2024, up 97% since 2019, a surge Nasdaq wants to capture directly rather than cede to platforms already open around the clock.

A market that increasingly never sleeps

Traditional exchanges have been under mounting pressure to broaden access and increase available hours.

Geopolitical shocks under the Trump administration have repeatedly landed when Wall Street was shut, most notably when US and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites were announced on a Saturday morning in February, forcing traders onto crypto exchanges and decentralised platforms to price oil, gold and silver in real time.

Those venues, along with newer tools such as tokenised real-world assets, which are digital tokens representing ownership of stocks, bonds or commodities, and perpetual futures contracts that let investors bet on an asset's price with no expiry date, have shown that demand for round-the-clock trading does not wait for exchanges to open.

Nasdaq is also not moving alone.

Rival NYSE has already won SEC approval for a 22-hour day running from 1:30am to 11:30pm ET, while Cboe, the largest exchange for options contracts in the US, has outlined similar ambitions.

Nasdaq first signalled its own intent to go nearly continuous back in March with this week's announcement filling in the details.

The new evening session serves as the first concrete building block, opening the market for nearly 23 hours in a five-day trading week, as the exchange ultimately wants to offer 24/7 trading.