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Different Audiences, Different Reasons to Trade Equities Overnight
By Jason Wallach, CEO, Bruce Markets
The traditional U.S. trading day is starting to look increasingly out of step with the financial world around it. FX and futures already operate across most of the business week, digital assets trade continuously and tokenization is beginning to make 24/7 movement of traditional securities possible. Meanwhile, the infrastructure beneath U.S. equities is extending with the market: NSCC moved to 24x5 clearing in June, and the SEC is now convening the industry specifically around preparations for 24-hour equity trading.
The case for extended hours, however, is not that every investor wants to trade every stock around the clock. It is that the U.S. equity market serves a huge and increasingly global range of investors – and access outside the core session solves very different problems for different participants.
For U.S. retail investors, the value is flexibility and immediacy. Earnings, geopolitical developments and breaking news routinely arrive outside regular hours, and overnight trading gives investors the ability to respond when information changes rather than wait for the next opening bell. In a recent report informed by a survey of 95 market participants on the shift to 24x5 trading, DTCC and Ernst & Young (EY) identify retail demand as an important source of momentum, specifically pointing to the flexibility to trade outside traditional hours and the ability to respond to global events as they happen.
For U.S. institutions, the value is less about convenience than capability. Just 14% of buy-side traders surveyed by Coalition Greenwich earlier this year said they were “enthusiastic” about round-the-clock trading. But enthusiasm may be the wrong measure of its value. A portfolio manager does not need to be constantly active overnight to benefit from the ability to adjust a position when circumstances demand it. DTCC identifies earnings releases, geopolitical developments and overnight news as specific institutional use cases, and more than half of respondents to its survey expect institutional activity to increase during periods of market stress or heightened volatility. Systematic traders may also find opportunities in overnight liquidity imbalances or price dislocations.
For international retail investors, it’s a time zone issue. The U.S. overnight session falls within normal waking and business hours across much of Asia-Pacific, turning “overnight trading” into daytime access to U.S. markets. And the underlying demand for that access continues to grow: Korean retail investors bought $4.6 billion of U.S. equities in July 2026 alone, their biggest month of the year and well above their 2025 monthly average.
International institutions bring yet another use case. Foreign investors held nearly $19.9 trillion in U.S. equities as of June 2025, underscoring the sheer scale of global exposure to the U.S. market. For asset managers, banks and other institutions managing those exposures from Asia-Pacific or Europe, longer hours can allow investment teams to act while they are already at work, local markets are open and regional news is developing. DTCC has specifically pointed to the ability of Asia-Pacific institutions to enter and exit positions more flexibly and respond to global market movements in real time.
These use cases differ, but they all reflect the same underlying reality: the U.S. equity market serves investors operating on different schedules, in different time zones and with different needs. A market that is global in participation will increasingly be expected to be global in availability too – and the shift is well underway.
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