The pitch for 24-hour stock trading sounds appealing: more access, more flexibility, more opportunity. But there's a difference between access and exposure. When markets never close, investors don't gain more control. They just stay at risk all the time.
Right now, the overnight pause is the only built-in protection most investors have. It gives the system breathing room to absorb information and process events. Take that away and you're not making markets easier to manage. You're making them harder.
Why Stocks Aren't Crypto
Proponents often point to cryptocurrency as proof that continuous trading works fine. But that comparison falls apart under scrutiny. Crypto trades nonstop because it exists in a vacuum. There are no earnings reports, no regulatory disclosures, no real-world operations forcing sudden valuation changes. Nothing outside the crypto ecosystem demands a timed market response.
Stocks don't have that luxury. Stock prices must react to earnings announcements, guidance revisions, accidents, investigations, executive departures, and countless other real-world events that affect business performance. That fundamental difference makes continuous equity trading a completely different beast.
Democratizing Risk, Not Access
The idea that 24-hour trading democratizes access is marketing spin. What it actually democratizes is risk. Everyone becomes exposed at all hours, even when they can't possibly monitor the market. More trading hours don't give the average investor more control. They just create more opportunities for things to go sideways while that investor is asleep or offline.
Volatility behaves completely differently when liquidity conditions change. During regular trading hours, markets are deep. A million-dollar sell order gets absorbed easily because desks are staffed and market makers are active. At 3:00 AM, that same order hits a vacuum. Overnight liquidity is thin, so a relatively small trade can crater a stock price instantly. There are no natural buyers to cushion the blow.
The current system forces prices to wait until morning when deep liquidity returns. A 24-hour market removes that buffer, letting thin-market volatility dictate valuations. It creates what you might call a liquidity mirage.
Who Benefits From Nonstop Trading?
This shift in market structure creates clear winners and losers. Today, overnight events get processed when everyone is watching. In a nonstop market, the first reaction goes to firms running automated systems or operating globally. Retail investors can't respond. U.S. traders working normal schedules can't respond. Even AI doesn't close this gap. Sure, AI reacts faster, but it can't prevent the price change triggered by the event. It just speeds up repricing and widens the separation between automated firms and everyone else.
Infrastructure Needs Downtime
Here's something most people don't consider: market infrastructure depends on downtime. Margin updates, risk model refreshes, clearing and settlement checks, surveillance reviews, collateral adjustments, reconciliation—all of this happens when markets are closed. These processes exist because they can't run safely while prices are moving.
Continuous trading eliminates the only window when this critical work can be done. Firms would need systems that operate continuously without relying on batch cycles. This isn't a staffing problem you can solve by hiring more people. It requires fundamentally redesigning how market architecture works.
Earnings Announcements Lose Their Structure
Companies release earnings before the open or after the close for good reason. The pause helps contain volatility. Investors and analysts use that downtime to digest the information. In a 24-hour market, every earnings release becomes a live trading event. Prices move immediately, regardless of when the announcement drops.
A late-night disclosure carries the same instant impact as a midday one. Blackout periods, insider trading rules, and disclosure practices all rely on defined trading sessions. Those assumptions break down entirely under continuous trading.
Global Liquidity Gets Fragmented
Today, trading follows a predictable rhythm. Asia trades, then Europe, then the United States. Liquidity clusters around each region's opening because that's when participants are active. In a market that never closes, this sequence becomes fragmented.
Liquidity will still peak during local business hours, but there's no clean handoff between regions anymore. Reactions happen whenever news breaks, not when sessions open. Market makers lose clear boundaries and must manage spreads without the structure created by distinct openings and closings.
Retail Investors Lose Protection
The overnight pause shields retail investors from sudden moves they can't possibly react to. In a continuous market, prices can shift at any hour. Retail investors gain more time to place trades but don't gain any additional ability to monitor or manage risk. Their exposure increases while their capacity to respond stays exactly the same.
They don't gain access. They gain continuous vulnerability.
The Bottom Line
A 24-hour equity market doesn't make trading more fair. It makes risk continuous. Volatility becomes immediate. Earnings lose their structured release pattern. Institutions lose the reset period they depend on. Liquidity becomes fragmented across time zones. Retail investors lose the only buffer protecting them from information gaps they can't bridge.
AI speeds up reactions but doesn't reduce the impact of real events. It only accelerates who gets to respond first.
The industry can frame continuous trading as expanded access all it wants. But the operational reality tells a different story. Twenty-four-hour markets don't democratize access. They democratize risk.