Trading the US all night long
Asian retail investors are becoming a force in US stock markets, a precursor to the US itself becoming a market that trades more like crypto.
The demand by Asian retail investors to trade US stocks during Asia’s daytime is pushing the US itself to extend its own trading hours to be open nearly around the clock. The longer term implications, should trading equities in tokenized form become prevalent, and which implies a 24/7 market, is that global equities markets are being pushed closer to a crypto-like environment, even if the drivers of this trend are unrelated.
The US equities market is the world’s largest, with a total market capitalization of $66 trillion. Daily trading volumes continue to reach record highs, hitting 17.6 billion shares and notional value of more than $1 trillion.
Investors in Asia and the Middle East have long desired to trade this market in their own daytimes, a wish that has recently become a reality. The boom in memestocks and raging tech names such as Nvidia and Tesla have added to the furore.
Early ATS
The first attempts emerged in Japan as long ago as 1998, when the first alternative trading systems launched.
ATSs are broker-dealers that share the trading mechanics, technology, and participants as stock exchanges. The difference is regulation. Exchanges are self-regulated organizations with listing standards and surveillance obligations. ATSs are broker-dealers supervised by securities regulators and with fewer disclosure requirements.
Japan labels its version of these ‘proprietary trading systems’. There were 10 PTSs active during the 2000s, but they failed to crack the market. Today there are now just two (Japannext, owned by SBI, and Osaka Digital Exchange; a third, Cboe Japan, closed in 2025 with Chicago-based Cboe taking stakes in the two survivors). It has taken that industry 28 years to achieve 12 percent market share in Japan.
Its impact in the US has been minimal: these PTSs are only allowed to trade in Japanese stocks. But they established the idea of ‘night trading’, allowing Japanese punters to observe US and European market activity before placing trades in Japan, with PTSs operating sessions in the evening.
Blue Ocean in Korea
Although these PTSs don’t touch US equities, they highlighted interest among Asian retail investors to trade after work and after dinner, and the fact that they actively tracked US markets.
In June 2021, a new US-based ATS called Blue Ocean connected the dots and pitched itself directly to Korean retail investors, offering to place trades in US stocks during the Korean day. Blue Ocean’s innovation was to create a new trading schedule in the US, operating from Sunday 8pm to Thursday 4am, US Eastern Standard Time.
That corresponds to daytime in Korea, and Korean retail makes up 40 percent of Blue Ocean’s volumes; other Asian markets comprise another 30 percent, while American investors who want to trade during their nighttime (especially meme stocks) make up the remaining 30 percent. Blue Ocean dominated US overnight trading volume, which has come to make up about 1 percent of total US equity volume.
The experiment almost collapsed. Blue Ocean relies on local Korean brokers, notably including Samsung Securities, to reach their investors. Rival brokers and Korean regulators were alarmed by the huge surge in uptake; Blue Ocean also suffered a system outage that led to questions about investor protections. Korean brokers suspended Blue Ocean’s service in 2024, and it only resumed in early 2025; the ATS has since opened an office in Seoul.
NexTrade
The wild success of Blue Ocean convinced South Korean regulators that they needed to upgrade their own market, lest they see more volume sucked into US firms. In 2025, shortly before Blue Ocean was allowed to resume service, the Korean Securities and Futures Commission broke Korea Exchange’s seven-decades long monopoly on stock exchange business by granting a license to the first homegrown ATS, NexTrade.
Like its Japanese peers, NexTrade only allows trading of domestic stocks, and it differentiated itself by offering extended trading hours into the Korean evening, along with lower fees. Unlike in Japan, the authorities in Seoul did not burden NexTrade with many rules designed to protect incumbent exchanges.
NexTrade took off like a rocket. It took it less than one year to secure 30 percent of the local market share, compared to the 12 percent that Japan’s PTSs have eked out in their market after more than 25 years.
At the same time, two more American ATSs have entered the Asian markets: Moon ATS, operated by OTC Markets Group, and Bruce ATS, operated by Bruce Markets, a company operated by PEAK6 Investments. Both ATSs were licensed in the US in late 2024, and explicitly target retail investors in Asia. Both were able to sign distribution deals with Korean domestic brokers, who were eager to break Blue Ocean’s monopoly as it resumed activity.
Going 23/5
These three US-based ATSs are now bringing liquidity to the US overnight market. Their flow is entirely retail, but that attracts market makers. These ATSs expect this will lead to interest from ETF brokers and designers of structured products. Should they realize their hopes of collectively winning up to 10 percent of total US equity volumes over the coming years, this amount of liquidity would finally encourage US institutional investors to participate in the overnight market.
Something like that may be bound to happen anyway. The rise of overnight trading in the US and the obvious appetite from Asian retail investors has pushed the US to transform its market to trade “23/5”, five days a week around the clock, with only a one-hour gap (at 8pm, EST) to reset the matching engines.
This new extended trading schedule is meant to launch on December 6 this year, pending full regulatory approvals.
Most market participants in the US don’t care about 23/5. They didn’t ask for it and it represents a new reality that will require thinking about risk management and operational flows.
But it’s not for US investors; it’s for Asians. For now, this market is dominated by three young ATSs, but when the US goes 23/5, the bulge bracket will jump in, offering access to a greater number of company stocks, including American depository receipts (synthetic representations of foreign-listed stocks).
Some participants also believe that more liquidity and attention will spur activity among US investors. Just as Asians want to trade their local market on the back of news out of the West, US investors may want to watch what happens in Asia to decide how to trade at home; the surprise announcement of DeepSeek in 2024 is one example of a market-moving event.
Building on T+1
The US decision to embrace a 23/5 system is not just a reaction to Asian demand. It is made possible by America’s own move to T+1 (settling one day after a trade) in 2024. This has compressed time allowed for brokers, asset managers, and custodians match, report, and close trades. So far the move from T+2 has gone smoothly, suggesting the processes are in place to handle additional flows during late hours.
The overnight ATSs have also impacted market efficiency. Spreads are narrowing. Market makers are now deploying smart-order routing to the ATSs, to enable best execution. (In the US, brokers are required to place an order at the exchange offering the best price, which is meaningful in such a big market with multiple stock exchanges; ATSs as broker-dealers are exempt from this rule, but competitive forces will probably enforce best-execution practices.)
Smart-order routing is a technology consideration. Moving to 23/5 requires some more tech upgrades and problems to be solved. It’s a big project, but it’s one that is well understood.
Challenges
There are bigger questions, mostly in the realm of tax and compliance, particularly regarding clients based overseas. These legalistic details will determine basic questions such as whether bulge-bracket firms serve Asian clients from teams in the US working the night shift, or if they place relationship managers (who are licensed with US SEC Series 7 credentials) in Asia.
There’s also going to be a mind shift: when the US working week begins on Sunday night, and the actual trading takes place “tomorrow” (crossing the international date line), firms will face personnel and management challenges.
Operations will pose more concrete issues for the industry. Some aspects of post-trade processing should remain straightforward, such as batching overnight trades to the following day’s work to calculate NAVs. But others are not. Corporate actions pose new risks when they involve many time zones. For now, the ATSs say they suspend trading in any ticker that announces a material action. This doesn’t provide the same assurance as the regulatory requirements on exchanges.
Another aspect that will need to be harmonized is order limits. When a stock’s price crashes (or surges), regulatory circuit-breakers force exchanges to freeze trading. ATSs don’t have to.
ATS executives say competitive forces will lead to harmonized rules, but without regulation, the ATSs will always be able to wriggle out of such obligations; which is why the big exchanges in the US may demand ATSs fall more under similar rules.
Retail investors are either oblivious to these details, or powerless to change them, but institutional investors have clout. It’s possible that regulation needn’t be heavy-handed, if overnight trading grows big enough to attract institutions, starting with hedge funds. Institutions would insist on tighter rules to protect themselves. That may lead to the necessary changes; if not, regulators will have to step in.
Regulation may or not be needed, but automation is going to be a must, if the markets are to maintain true straight-through processing 23/5. Ditto as more jurisdictions, including Europe and maybe Hong Kong, also move to T+1.
From 23/5 to 24/7?
While 23/5 is a big structural change to US equity markets, it might be just another step towards matching crypto’s 24/7 environment. NYSE and Nasdaq have already expressed interest in tokenizing equity assets. In January, NYSE said it will develop a blockchain-based paltform for trading and on-chain settlement of tokenized securities, which will operate as an ATS. The exchanges are already preparing to move beyond 23/5, in a phased approach.
The challenge isn’t tech: the DeFi world already supports fractionalized trading and round-the-clock trading. The challenge is how to explain this new world to the listed companies, whose leadership and investor-relations teams aren’t involved in crypto-anything, and could end up surprised by sudden volatility in their stock on a Sunday.
The best argument for caution is that people aren’t robots; we need a break. Technology and sensible rules around risk may make 24/7 – or even just 23/5 – possible. The direction seems clear to industry participants. The US is moving to 23/5 largely in response to Asian retail demand for overnight trading. On top of this, Wall Street firms are keen to adopt tokenization for its efficiencies, speed, and capital treatment. A non-stop market promises enormous volumes; it also guarantees new risks and new problems. Gradually, as overnight trading diversifies to include more institutional investors, it will serve as a stepping stone to enable at least part of the market to dance all night long.