[ I N D E P T H | 2 4 H O U R E Q U I T I E S T R A D I N G ]
vantage rather than reducing market hours. I don ' t see the need and I wouldn ' t say I ' m a big advocate of reducing market hours. The overlap is important, particularly as we ' re all trying to grow capital market participation.”
Culture clash A clear disparity exists between the US and Europe when it comes to this topic, which brings into question why such opposing views exist. Retail participation is much larger in the US, but also, liquidity dynamics and volumes are notably different too.
“ If you look at the liquidity between the US and Europe, it ' s vastly different. The US has been growing. The European trading day is longer than our trading day in terms of regular market hours and it ' s heavily skewed towards the closing auction. We have a very large closing auction but there ' s not as much of a skew here as there is in some of the European markets,” says NYSE’ s Tyrrell.
“ That all adds up to just regular continuous trading. What we do even today in the extended hour sessions would just be much harder in Europe. There doesn ' t seem to be a lot of liquidity in the regular hours as it is.”
Echoing this, Nadsaq’ s Haglind notes that from a global investor perspective, there is a huge focus on the US as a market of choice based on the depth of the liquidity.“ Through conversations with our European technology clients, based in the middle of global time zones, there isn’ t the same level of demand compared to the US. However, market operators are increasingly assessing how they can enhance their infrastructure to make sure they’ re ready as investor appetite increases,” he says.
“ Across different client groups we see interesting dynamics between serving local market participants, with a shortening of trading hours in some cases, and the need to attract global liquidity.”
At present, it’ s hard to justify European equities as having sufficient liquidity to trade on a 24 / 7 basis. Market participants within the region argue that that’ s not where the focus should lie.
“ Perhaps there ' s an argument to say it makes sense
“ We see more and more firms here in the US expanding and supporting overnight trading, or relying on their offices in Hong Kong, Tokyo or Singapore, to support their 24 by five trading.”
BRIAN HYNDMAN, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE AT BLUE OCEAN TECHNOLOGIES
to try and find ways to provide facilities for retail investors to be able to trade when they want to, in ways that give them good outcomes, to help with the overall liquidity picture,” suggests Fruen.
“ But ultimately, having a core market session which includes an open, a continuous session and a close, is probably something the majority of the incumbent institutional investors and sell-sides and even venues want to maintain.”
Shifting trading desk dynamics If the industry were to transition to extended trading hours, the changes would likely mean round-theclock operations, increased compliance, staffing and monitoring. Trading desks, and their make-up, are defined by changes in the landscape, be it through developments such a T + 1, the introduction of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, and growing global presences.
“ Trading desks are evolving and this started out with the crypto trading craze. As crypto trades 24 / 7 365, certain firms had overnight desks already built to support that,” says Brian Hyndman, president and chief executive at Blue Ocean Technologies.
“ It was an easy extension to begin trading equities if you were already trading other asset classes overnight. We see more and more firms here in the US expanding and supporting overnight trading, or rely-
30 // TheTRADE // Q1 2025