Hey Traders,
I’ve been getting asked about 24-hour trading a lot this week, and I get why.
On Monday, October 19th, CBOE started letting people trade options on 24 of the most popular stocks and five ETFs before and after the regular session.
Stocks themselves are on track to trade 23 hours a day, five days a week starting December 6th.
Now everybody wants to know if this changes everything, whether they’ll need to be up at 3 a.m. watching their positions, and if their strategy still works.
My honest answer? It doesn’t keep me up at night.
And you don’t have to guess how this plays out, because the 24-hour market already exists. It’s called futures.
I’ve Already Worked the Night Shift
When I moved into macro back in 2013, I had to switch to markets that basically never close. Crude, gold, currencies, Treasury notes and S&P futures have traded around the clock for years. If you want to know what trading at 2 a.m. looks like, that’s where you look.
What you’ll find is pretty simple. Even now, in 2026, options outside the regular session are awful. Gold options spreads go super wide the minute their session closes. Crude oil options get wider once the old pit hours end, and there isn’t even a pit anymore. Ten-year note options widen out a little, and the FX options guys sometimes don’t bother posting a market at all.
The S&P futures are the one exception. Everybody around the world trades them, and somebody’s always looking for a hedge. They’re the New York City of the market, the product that never sleeps.
The regular players still want to trade the old way. The hours changed and the habits didn’t.
Who’s Trading at 3 A.M.?
Underneath all of that sits a liquidity question. You can already trade stocks from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. on some exchanges, and most of the action still bunches up near the open and the close. That’s where the real money trades. The giant custodial funds execute their big orders near the close, and I don’t think they can or will change how they do that just because an exchange tacked on some hours. That’s the underlying, and without liquidity in the underlying, there can’t be liquidity in the options, by definition.
Liquidity begets liquidity, and illiquidity begets illiquidity. It’s a catch-22. For these overnight sessions to really get going, people need a reason to trade during Asian and then European hours.
There might be one. Asia has a big hand in the semiconductor race, and there seems to be a real appetite for hedging the names inside the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) overnight and across borders. If this catches on anywhere first, I’d bet it’s there.
In theory, all this should suppress volatility. A name that trades almost around the clock shouldn’t gap overnight anymore. But it’s going to be messy for a while.
The Only Order I’d Send Early
So what would I actually use it for?
Exits on short-term trades. That’s the only place I’d be willing to start. If I’m holding a winner and the stock rips overnight on news, selling into that strength before the bell is a real tool. It works best when you already know where you want out.
I’ll say one more thing from my futures days. There was real edge in short-term trading when you could get filled overnight. A story that drove the U.S. session would sometimes run out of buyers or sellers once New York went to bed. If you had a bid or an offer resting close to the market, the dip or rally overseas would come right to you, and you’d get filled at a price you’d never see in the middle of the day.
That edge will probably show up here too, eventually. Early on, though, it’s the exits you’ll want.
If you trade on a longer time frame, I wouldn’t worry about any of this. A few extra hours of thin trading doesn’t change a thesis that plays out over months.
The market’s going to be open longer. The money’s still going to show up when it always has.
Enjoy the journey,
Tim