By Ram Vittal, Chief Executive Officer, Americas, Marex

For the past forty-one years, the U.S. equity market’s regular trading session has opened at 9:30 a.m. and closed at 4:00 p.m. ET, but these hours are changing. Notably, NYSE Arca has SEC approval to lengthen its weekday trading session to 22 hours, the DTCC’s National Securities Clearing Corporation is now clearing on a 24×5 basis, and Nasdaq and Cboe have filed to run near around-the-clock.

Amid these monumental market changes, the most interesting question is not whether markets can trade 24×7, but how liquidity, risk transfer, funding, and market resilience evolve as trading hours extend.

More than a moment in time

For decades, the market close has produced an official price against which the entire ecosystem squares itself: net asset values, index rebalances, margin calls, collateral valuations, risk reports, and more. It also creates a window in which errors are caught, positions are reconciled, and clearinghouses can mark every member to market and call for collateral before the next session begins.

A market that trades around the clock needs every one of those functions to run continuously. Fortunately, “continuous” is no longer a concept in search of technology. It is an operating reality that’s running at scale today in digital assets.

Digital assets paved the way — but the ecosystem is still catching up

Digital assets never close, with continuous price discovery, real-time risk and margining, prefunding, and collateral that can move at any hour of any day.

Crypto created the initial demand for 24/7 markets, building infrastructure for continuous operation from day one. That demand is now extending naturally to other asset classes that share similar characteristics. Equities, precious metals, and FX are all markets that can be priced and settled in cash terms at any hour, which is precisely why these asset classes are now following crypto’s lead toward around-the-clock trading.

Trading activity and market access have moved faster than the supporting ecosystem; settlement, risk management, funding flows, and collateral mobility are still catching up in places, even in digital assets. And continuous trading does not automatically mean continuous liquidity. Today’s market structure can support near-continuous price discovery, but liquidity still concentrates around the hours of highest participation. In equities, that concentration shows up at the open and the close, where a disproportionate share of daily volume trades. There is little reason to expect that pattern to disappear simply because the tape stays open longer.

Where digital assets have made real progress is on the plumbing. Stablecoins have given digital-asset markets a cash leg that settles on a Saturday night as easily as a Tuesday afternoon, and tokenization has enabled collateral to move alongside the trade rather than days behind it. That infrastructure is not hypothetical; it’s operating now, even if the liquidity built on top of it is still maturing.

The practical case for caution

Extending trading hours is not simply a technology upgrade. For prime brokers, FCMs, and other market participants, it is an operating-model change, and the challenges are worth naming plainly.

Risk management on a near around-the-clock basis requires more than new systems; it requires more people, in more time zones, watching the book. Banking itself is not yet a 24/7 business, so a margin call generated at 3 a.m. can still run into a client, or a bank, that is not reachable until Monday morning. And thinner participation in extended hours cuts both ways: it is what makes an always-on market possible, but it is also what makes it more volatile. In other markets that already trade over the weekend, prices often drift back toward the Friday close once Monday’s deeper liquidity returns, a signal that price discovery during those quieter hours is not as reliable as it looks in real time.

None of this argues against extending hours. It argues for building the extension around those realities rather than ignoring them.

What equities can borrow from the digital-asset playbook

The reconciliation anchor that the close provides does not have to disappear. It has to become continuous — and many of the tools to make it so already exist:

Real-time risk and margin. Rather than relying on a single end-of-day mark, intraday valuation and dynamic margining — disciplines that digital-asset venues employ around the clock — allow risk to be measured and managed in the hours when the system most needs it, rather than being calibrated only to daytime norms.

Prefunding and tokenized collateral. One common objection to a 24/7 securities market is that money still keeps bankers’ hours, and a guarantee you cannot collateralize until Monday is not much of a guarantee. Prefunding and stablecoin-style instant payment rails close this gap, ensuring the backstop behind a 3 a.m. trade is funded at 3 a.m.

Margin calibrated to overnight conditions. Overnight liquidity is thinner than during the regular session, so margin frameworks should be calibrated to overnight depth rather than daytime averages, tightening dynamically when the order book does — and accounting for the reality that thinner books mean sharper moves.

Transparency for every tradable hour. Extending the consolidated tape across the full overnight session — targeted for year-end — gives the dark hours the same transparency the national market system promises in daylight.

Most of these tools are running in production somewhere in the digital-asset stack today. The work ahead is adaptation and integration, not invention — but it is real work, not a formality.

The bridge between two worlds

The closing bell has served markets for more than a century. Retiring it doesn’t mean giving up liquidity, risk transfer, or funding, but it does mean building them to run continuously.

Longer term, the destination may look less like equities adopting a few digital-asset tools and more like a real convergence toward DeFi-style infrastructure, where settlement and finality happen in the same instant. The rails already built and tested for digital assets can help bring in this next era of market structure, as long as we’re building for the market we’ll have overnight.