Traders are the big winners as 24/7 stocks will finally end the after-hours price 'manipulation'
If the closing bell has long been a business model, then 24/7 trading is an attempt to break it. As the NYSE, Nasdaq, CME and Cboe race to introduce round-the-clock trading, the question is who stands to gain and who could lose.
The answer is quite simple, Mati Greenspan, CEO and founder of Quantum Economics, told CoinDesk: “The biggest losers in 24/7 stock trading won’t be traders: they’ll benefit massively. It'll be the middlemen who’ve long made money when traders can’t trade.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), in its 2026 Annual Regulatory Oversight Report, cited firms for “failing to maintain reasonably designed supervisory systems and controls, including with respect to the identification and reporting of potentially manipulative activity conducted in after-hours trading.”
A win for retail?
Whether it's hard to point out how widespread these accusations are, one thing is for sure: if trading goes 24/7, traders will be the ultimate winners, particularly retail traders.
In today's electronic markets, traders who respond fastest to market news have a structural advantage.
“There’s always an edge for whoever has the fastest computers and the best program writers,” said Dente, noting that algorithms can react to news and orders “in a nanosecond.” For individual investors, he added, keeping up with that speed is difficult. “How does the human person keep up with that?”
And reacting to these events becomes even harder for smaller investors when the market is closed, leaving those retail or smaller traders at a massive disadvantage.
Pranav Ramesh, head of quantitative research for options at Nasdaq and co-founder of Leadpoet, said thin markets can amplify those risks.
“Broker coordination may often show up as industry-wide alignment around routing and execution practices, especially where a large share of retail flow ends up with a small number of wholesalers,” he said. “Outside regular hours, scrutiny can be harder because the market is thinner and there are fewer straightforward reference points for investors to benchmark execution quality,” Ramesh said in his personal capacity.
Sources familiar with broker routing and liquidity practices told CoinDesk that price-setting power in thin sessions is real, particularly when major news breaks while markets are closed. According to those sources, coordination around routing, spreads and execution practices during extended gaps has historically been easier precisely because retail traders cannot participate.
This is precisely what around-the-clock trading will solve for traders, according to Greenspan, who said 24/7 markets would blunt fintech firms' advantage by removing the weekend vacuum entirely.
The recent Middle East conflict has been a perfect example of how this can open up more trading opportunities when markets remain closed. Decentralized exchange, Hyperliquid, which trades on blockchain 24/7, has seen growing interest from traders betting on traditional financial assets, including oil and gold, during the weekend, when traditional exchanges are closed.
It has become so popular that weekly derivatives trading volume on the platform topped $50 billion, while it generated $1.6 million in revenue over 24 hours, outpacing the entire Bitcoin blockchain's revenue. The platform has also recently added an S&P 500 perpetual contract.
Needless to say, major exchanges will also likely benefit from trading fees if they open for 24/7 trading.
Whether round-the-clock trading ultimately weakens brokers’ influence on price setting remains to be seen. What is clear is that exchanges and investors stand to gain from markets that never close.
“Traders can react in real time without being at the mercy of the middlemen — the brokers,” said Greenspan.
