1. The Closing Bell May Be on Its Way Out
For more than a century, the New York Stock Exchange's opening and closing bells have served as the defining temporal markers of the American trading day. That era is ending. Both the NYSE and Nasdaq have filed regulatory proposals to move toward near-continuous trading sessions, and the Securities and Exchange Commission is reviewing plans that could see U.S. equities trading on extended schedules as soon as the second half of 2026. The CME has also announced plans for 24-hour crypto futures, pending approval, and Cboe has already expanded U.S. index options to a 24/5 schedule.
What looks like a straightforward operational expansion — giving investors more hours to trade — carries deeper structural implications for who controls price discovery, who profits from thin-liquidity windows, and whether the information asymmetries that currently disadvantage retail participants can be narrowed or eliminated. The move toward continuous trading is, at its core, a redistribution of market power.
2. The After-Hours Window and What Happens In It
To understand why the shift to 24/7 trading is framed by some as a consumer protection issue as much as an infrastructure upgrade, it is necessary to understand what currently happens between the closing bell and the next morning's open. After-hours trading sessions exist — major brokerages already allow clients to trade in pre-market and post-market windows — but they are characterized by conditions fundamentally different from the regular session. Volume is thin, bid-ask spreads widen, and liquidity is limited. Large price moves can occur on relatively small order sizes in a way that would be impossible during the main session.
These conditions are not simply a function of lower participation. They create specific structural opportunities for parties with privileged access to information, order flow, or infrastructure. When a significant earnings release, economic data print, or geopolitical development occurs outside regular trading hours, the price discovery that occurs before the market opens is conducted in a low-liquidity environment where the participants best positioned to act are not retail investors sitting at home, but institutional desks, algorithmic systems, and in some cases the intermediaries themselves.
3. Industry Insiders Describe the Manipulation Dynamic
In reporting on the transition to 24/7 trading, one industry participant — identified as operating in the broker-dealer space and speaking on condition of anonymity — described the after-hours environment in unusually direct terms. When asked whether brokers coordinate around pricing during market closures, the response was unambiguous: manipulation occurs, concentrated positions are used to hunt stop-losses, and the advantage of controlling the opening price after hours of strategic planning is substantial.
The characterization is serious, and it is worth noting that it comes from within the industry rather than from a regulatory enforcement action. However, the framing aligns with documented patterns that regulatory agencies have been tracking. In late 2025, the SEC settled charges over a multi-year spoofing scheme involving deceptive orders used to move prices in thinly traded securities. FINRA, in its 2026 Annual Regulatory Oversight Report, cited broker-dealers for failures in their supervisory systems to identify and report potentially manipulative activity conducted specifically in after-hours trading. And the regulator fined Velox Clearing $1.3 million for failing to detect "layering" and "spoofing" patterns in volatile stocks.
4. Academic Research on Opening Auction Manipulation
Independent academic research adds structural context to the insider accounts. A widely cited study published on SSRN examined opening price manipulation through the pre-open auction mechanism that most exchanges use to establish the day's starting price. The research found that brokers can influence pre-open auction prices by submitting large orders and then canceling them before the auction closes, temporarily pushing prices away from their fundamental value. Because the auction occurs before the full liquidity of the regular session is present, these distortions can set opening prices at levels that later correct once full trading resumes — leaving investors who transacted at the manipulated opening price with systematic, recurring losses.
Joint research from UC Berkeley and the University of Rochester reinforced the broader picture, finding that price discovery outside standard trading sessions is less efficient and more vulnerable to distortion. The researchers identified that thin volume and restricted liquidity during off-hours slow the incorporation of new information into prices, creating windows where informed parties have an advantage over those acting on the same publicly available information but without the tools or access to act ahead of the market's reopening.
5. NYSE and Nasdaq's Regulatory Filings
The NYSE and Nasdaq have both taken concrete regulatory steps toward extended trading. The NYSE, through its parent company Intercontinental Exchange, received SEC approval on an expedited basis for a plan to extend trading hours on NYSE Arca to a 22/5 schedule. That expansion is expected to roll out in late 2026, pending required data-feed upgrades. Beyond the Arca expansion, ICE announced in January 2026 plans for a digital NYSE platform using tokenized securities that would enable true 24/7 trading alongside instant settlement and dollar-based ordering — a more ambitious reimagining of the exchange's architecture subject to additional regulatory review.
Nasdaq filed paperwork with the SEC in late 2025 proposing a 23/5 schedule structured across two sessions: a day session running from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET and a night session from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. ET, with the one-hour gap reserved for maintenance and trade clearance. If approved, the Nasdaq expansion is expected to launch in the second half of 2026. Together, the two proposals represent a near-total elimination of the current overnight closure window, leaving only the narrowest maintenance gap in what has been a standard market structure for over a century.
6. How 24/7 Trading Changes the Power Dynamic
The primary argument for extended trading hours from a market structure perspective is that continuous operation reduces the periods during which intermediaries can exploit information asymmetries and low liquidity to profit at the expense of investors. If significant news — an earnings release, a central bank statement, a geopolitical development — breaks overnight and the market is open to trade it, the price adjustment happens immediately and continuously, incorporating information into the price at roughly the same speed for all participants. The stop-loss hunting, the pre-auction manipulation, and the coordinated after-hours position building that insiders describe become structurally difficult when the market never closes and liquidity never fully drains.
For retail investors specifically, 24/7 trading removes the disadvantage of being locked out of the market while institutional participants and sophisticated intermediaries act on breaking information. A retail investor who holds a position and wakes up to find it down 15% because of overnight news that was acted on exclusively by market participants with after-hours access has been structurally disadvantaged by the current system in a way that continuous trading would eliminate. Whether they could have or would have acted on the same information is a separate question — the structural disadvantage is removed regardless.
7. The Counter-Argument: Thin Liquidity Doesn't Disappear
Not everyone in the financial industry is enthusiastic about the transition to round-the-clock trading. The concerns from the opposition center on the risk that moving to a 24/7 schedule does not eliminate thin liquidity — it distributes it across a longer trading window, potentially making thin-liquidity conditions more common and persistent rather than confined to predictable off-hours windows.
Joe Dente of the NYSE has acknowledged that lower transaction volumes during extended hours cause bid-ask spreads to widen, exposing traders to more erratic price swings. If institutional desks and liquidity providers do not staff continuous operations — if they continue to concentrate activity during the most active hours of the traditional session — then the overnight and weekend windows of a 24/7 schedule could be just as thin as the current after-hours market, but now with retail investors actively trading in them rather than being sidelined. Wells Fargo's trading desk offered perhaps the most colorful internal dissent, describing the move to 24/7 trading as potentially the worst gamification of the stock market imaginable.
8. The Crypto Market as a Living Precedent
The cryptocurrency market has operated on a 24/7 basis since its inception, and the lessons from that experience are instructive for traditional finance's transition. Crypto's continuous operation has not eliminated thin-liquidity windows — it has redistributed them to weekends and holidays when institutional participants are less active, creating recurring patterns of reduced liquidity, wider spreads, and elevated volatility during those periods that are well-documented in market data.
The Drift Protocol exploit on April 1 occurred on a non-standard trading day and involved significant cross-market liquidity fragmentation that contributed to the attacker's ability to move stolen funds with limited resistance. Bitcoin's options market has shown heightened fragility in thin-liquidity periods, and the CME futures and ETF activity that pauses over the Easter holiday creates well-understood windows of reduced institutional support. These dynamics do not argue against 24/7 trading — they argue for managing expectations about what 24/7 operation actually delivers in practice, and for ensuring that market structure safeguards are designed for the liquidity profile of continuous markets rather than the regulated auction framework of the traditional session.
9. Crypto's Influence on the Traditional Finance Transition
It is not coincidental that the push toward 24/7 stock trading is accelerating at the same moment that tokenized securities, blockchain-based settlement, and crypto-native financial infrastructure are entering mainstream institutional adoption. The operational and technical infrastructure that crypto markets have built to support continuous, global trading is informing the design choices being made by traditional exchanges. ICE's tokenized securities platform for the NYSE draws directly on blockchain settlement mechanics. Flow Traders, one of the world's leading exchange-traded product market makers, launched 24/7 over-the-counter liquidity for tokenized assets in March 2026, demonstrating that institutional-grade liquidity provision for continuous markets is technically achievable at scale.
The convergence of traditional and crypto market infrastructure is bidirectional. Crypto is acquiring the regulatory frameworks, institutional participation structures, and compliance standards of traditional finance. Traditional finance is acquiring the continuous operation, programmable settlement, and global access characteristics of crypto. The 24/7 stock trading proposals are one of the most visible expressions of that convergence in the direction of the traditional market adopting crypto's temporal model.
10. Who Wins, Who Loses, and What Comes Next
The clearest winners of a shift to round-the-clock stock trading are active retail traders with access to information outside regular hours and the inclination to act on it — a group that has historically been structurally disadvantaged by the current system. The clearest losers are intermediaries whose business models have relied on the informational and liquidity advantages that after-hours and pre-market windows provide. Whether that category of intermediary actually engages in the practices insiders describe, or whether such practices are isolated rather than systemic, will be tested by the market structure that continuous trading creates.
The regulatory timeline for both the NYSE Arca expansion and the Nasdaq 23/5 proposal points toward implementation in the second half of 2026. For investors, the practical implications will take time to materialize — liquidity providers, market makers, and brokerages will need to adapt their operations, and the initial extended-hours sessions will likely be thin compared to the core trading day. But the structural direction is clear, and the momentum behind it — driven by competitive pressure from crypto markets, investor demand for flexibility, and a regulatory environment that has been receptive to expanded access — appears unlikely to reverse. The closing bell as the definitive end of the trading day is a feature of financial markets that may belong to a previous era.