The Earnings Call Went 24/7. Wall Street’s Clock Did Not.
Markets now price the news around the clock. The exchanges that host them still keep office hours. That gap is about to matter to everyone, not just to traders.
Start with a scene that now plays out every few weeks. A large company reports its quarterly results a few minutes after the US closing bell. The figures miss. On television and in group chats, the verdict forms within the hour. And yet the stock itself does nothing, because the exchange it trades on has gone home for the night. Millions of people know the news. Not one of them can act on it through the ordinary market until the following morning.
For decades that pause was simply how investing worked. Report after the close, digest overnight, trade at the open. The whole choreography rests on an assumption almost no one says out loud: that between the announcement and the next session the price cannot move, because there is nowhere for it to move. That assumption has quietly stopped being true, and I do not think the industry has fully absorbed what it means.
The same household names that anchor most portfolios, the Apples, Nvidias and Teslas, now trade around the clock in tokenized form, alongside the derivatives that track them. A position can change hands at two in the morning on a Sunday as well as at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday. So when guidance disappoints at 4:05 pm, the repricing does not wait for permission. It begins immediately, somewhere in the world, on a venue that never closed its doors.
This is not a forecast. It is already visible in the data.
Over the weekend of July 13, significant geopolitical news broke while US exchanges were dark. On the platform I run, trading in tokenized stocks ran more than ten times a normal week, led by tokenized Nvidia. Ordinary investors were repricing their exposure to major American companies in real time, on a Saturday and a Sunday, while the primary venues those companies list on stayed shut. A few years ago that would have been unthinkable. Now it is just a weekend.
The reason this matters has little to do with cryptocurrency and everything to do with a plain rule of markets: price discovery follows whoever is open when the news arrives.
If a story lands at eight in the evening and the only venues awake are the always-on ones, that is where the first layer of price discovery begins. The next morning’s opening bell then becomes a catch-up mechanism rather than the main event. An exchange exists to do one essential job, which is to establish the price of an asset. A market that keeps bankers’ hours in a world of around-the-clock information is slowly surrendering that job to whoever is willing to stay open.
There is a fairness dimension here that tends to get lost in the market-structure debate. The 9:30-to-4 trading day was built for a profession, not for the public. It was designed for a financial system centered on institutions, fixed sessions and local market hours. It suits far less the nurse coming off a shift, the teacher marking papers in the evening, or the investor in Lagos, Manila or Sao Paulo for whom New York’s opening bell rings in the middle of the night. When markets run continuously, the people who gain the most are not the professionals who already had every advantage. They are the ones who could never trade on their own schedule, because the schedule belonged to someone else. An always-on market is, among other things, a more accessible one.
The 9:30-to-4 trading day was built for a profession, not for the public. It was designed for a financial system centered on institutions, fixed sessions and local market hours. It suits far less the nurse coming off a shift, the teacher marking papers in the evening, or the investor in Lagos, Manila or Sao Paulo for whom New York’s opening bell rings in the middle of the night
This shift could also accelerate for a reason that has nothing to do with human habits. More than half of the people using the platform I run already rely on AI tools in some part of their trading, and software does not keep office hours. An automated agent told to act on an earnings surprise will try to act the moment the surprise happens, not at 9:30 the next morning. You cannot build genuinely autonomous, always-on trading on top of an infrastructure that closes at four in the afternoon and stays shut all weekend.
The intelligence is arriving quickly. Market infrastructure now has to catch up. Regulators are starting to confront this, which is often the clearest sign that a shift is real. In the United States, the securities regulator is weighing rules that would give tokenized, around-the-clock versions of US stocks a clearer path onto digital venues, and several traditional exchanges are lobbying hard against them, even as Nasdaq confirms a 23-hour trading day from December, pending SEC approval. That fight is worth watching, because it is not really about technology. It is about who gets to set the price when the market that sets it no longer needs to close. The debate is ultimately about how existing standards for investor protection, market integrity and price discovery translate into markets that can operate continuously.
None of this is to pretend the old frictions were pointless. Overnight liquidity is genuinely thinner, and prices can move more violently when fewer participants are around to take the other side. As someone who operates one of these venues, I see those trade-offs at close range, and they should not be dismissed. But they are reasons to build the continuous market carefully, with deeper liquidity and market-makers present at three in the morning, not reasons to insist the clock still holds. Demand does not wait for permission. It moves to wherever it is allowed to act.
For now, tokenized versions of traditional assets remain a rounding error, a fraction of a percent of the markets they mirror. I expect that to reach close to 10% within five years. Expressed in dollars, that is not a niche but trillions: trillions of dollars of stocks, funds and commodities that will trade whenever their owner, or their owner’s software, decides to, rather than whenever an exchange decides to unlock the doors.
The earnings call already runs around the clock. The information does, the reaction does, and increasingly the trading does as well. The only question left is whether the market itself will stay open to meet them, or whether it will keep the lights off a little longer and let someone else set the price.
Gracy Chen is the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Bitget and the first female CEO among the top ten crypto exchanges globally. She was appointed CEO in May 2024 after serving as Managing Director. She has led Bitget’s expansion into Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and now the United States. Chen holds a Bachelor’s degree from the National University of Singapore and a Master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
