The Always-On Brokerage: Liquidity, Risk and Infrastructure as Markets Move toward 24/7 Trading

Global trading is moving beyond the traditional market day. Crypto has set the expectation of continuous access, and exchanges, brokers, and market operators are now extending trading hours across equities, derivatives, and commodities to meet that demand. Overnight US equity volume, for example, has risen by 359% year-on-year, although it still accounts for less than 1% of total market activity.

But extending trading hours is not the same as extending liquidity. A platform can remain open around the clock while the liquidity behind it does not. The concentration of overnight activity illustrates this. The ten most actively traded stocks account for 43% of overnight volume, highlighting how limited liquidity can remain outside regular market hours.

As markets move toward continuous trading, the key challenge is therefore to ensure that sufficient liquidity is available to support meaningful trading throughout the day.

24/7 access does not guarantee 24/7 liquidity

As spreads widen, hedging options narrow, and risk accumulates across time zones, even as the open sign stays lit.

From extended hours to continuous access

Trading hours are expanding, but unevenly, and the market remains some distance from operating on a genuine 24/7 basis across all asset classes. It's worth separating what is already running from what has been announced and what remains under discussion.

Already live

Interactive Brokers — overnight trading in 10,000+ US stocks and ETFs, 8:00 pm–3:50 am ET on a 24/6 schedule, plus government bonds and equity index futures.

Robinhood — 24 Hour Market covering a curated list of popular stocks and ETFs, open Sunday 8:00 pm through Friday 8:00 pm ET.

24/7 gold, institutional — GBE Prime launched round-the-clock gold trading for institutional clients in August 2026, following earlier continuous gold/metals CFD rollouts from Scope Prime, Match-Prime, Vantage and VT Markets.

CME Group — continuous, seven-day trading in regulated crypto futures and options, launched in May 2026. CME subsequently reported more than 7,200 contracts and approximately $50 million in notional during the first weekend.

Announced, with a date

Nasdaq — near 23-hour trading day, adding a 9:00 pm – 4:00 am ET overnight session from December 6, 2026.

London Stock Exchange — LSE 24, a separate 24/5 venue for algorithmic and agentic trading. Client testing by end of 2026; ETPs targeted for H1 2027, pending approval; equities described as a later step.

U.S. SEC — a public roundtable took place on September 17th 2026, examining a move toward 24-hour trading in U.S. equity markets, including operational requirements for overnight trading. A discussion, not a rule change, with public comment invited.

Put together, the market is moving toward continuous access asset class by asset class and venue by venue. The transition is incremental and fragmented, with different venues, asset classes and regulatory systems moving at different speeds. Crypto derivatives and select U.S. equities are furthest along; broad equity-market access, including in the U.S. and U.K., is still in pilot phases and under regulatory review.

Liquidity and risk outside traditional sessions

Overnight trading in U.S. equities is expanding rapidly. According to SEC staff data , average daily overnight volume reached 144.6 million shares in August 2026. Even after that growth, overnight activity represented only 0.9% of total NMS share volume.

Liquidity was also far more concentrated than during the main session. The ten most active stocks accounted for 43.4% of overnight share volume, compared with 10.3% during regular trading hours. The top 100 stocks generated 82% of overnight volume, versus 34% in the regular session.

International participation appears to be an important source of this demand. During the second quarter of 2026, foreign accounts generated approximately 37% of overnight share volume and 24% of overnight dollar volume. That is a much larger share than in the early extended, regular or late extended sessions.

The overnight market is not limited to one investor category either. The SEC identified 67 broker-dealers executing overnight trades and 118 broker-dealers originating orders that were subsequently executed overnight. Activity comes from foreign investors, individual and institutional accounts, proprietary trading firms and market makers.

Public data does not yet show that automated strategies dominate overnight activity. New venues such as LSE 24 are being designed for algorithmic and agent-based trading, but that indicates how the market may develop rather than who currently generates most of its volume.

The current picture is therefore one of broader access combined with a relatively shallow and concentrated liquidity pool. Longer hours can attract orders from investors in other time zones, while also spreading trading activity across more venues and sessions. The benefit depends on whether participation and market-making capacity grow alongside access.

The direction is clear, but what about the fact that availability is not the same thing as liquidity? Can an instrument be tradable at 3 am without trading under conditions like it's daytime?

Outside core sessions, order books thin out. Fewer participants are active, fewer market makers are quoting continuously, and the result is typically wider spreads and a higher chance of slippage on anything beyond small size. Liquidity that does exist is often fragmented across a longer list of venues and providers than during the main session, since different regional markets and LPs come on- and off-line at different points in the day.

Weekend and overnight pricing in instruments like gold, which are now offered around the clock by several of the providers named above, also carries its own risk. With interbank and exchange reference markets thin or closed, a broker's own quote can drift further from any observable benchmark, and few of the new 24/7 gold offerings currently disclose how their weekend pricing is actually constructed.

This creates a structural gap between when clients want to trade and when the deepest hedging venues are open. A broker offering 24/7 access to an asset that only has genuinely liquid hedging markets for part of the day has to decide, continuously, how to manage that mismatch. For example, this could be done through

• internalisation and netting of client flow
• systematic external hedging when a position needs to be laid off,
• re-assessing as conditions change

But none of this is static, as it has to be monitored region by region and hour by hour, because the risk profile of an order book at 2 am in one time zone looks nothing like the same book eight hours later.

Sourcing, monitoring and distributing liquidity across more hours and more venues is itself a substantial infrastructure task, distinct from simply keeping a platform's servers running. B2CONNECT's infrastructure data illustrates the scale involved.

B2CONNECT currently coordinates 15 live LP integrations across 47 live LP sessions and 800+ subscribed markets, distributed across 17 live production hubs. That illustrates how many liquidity relationships, sessions and markets a broker's infrastructure may need to coordinate simultaneously once trading extends beyond a single core session.

The infrastructure behind the always-on brokerage

Extending trading hours touches every layer of the brokerage stack. Feeding distributed infrastructure with continuous, regionally accurate pricing is a workload in its own right. The figures below come from two separate systems: B2CONNECT data reflects connectivity and availability, while B2TRADER data reflects execution scale.

B2CONNECT's price-distribution layer currently sustains those 1,265 concurrent connections. That said, market-data distribution at scale is a substantial, continuous operation in its own right, separate from execution.

Platform availability and failover matter more, not less, once there is no longer an overnight window to run maintenance without touching live clients. B2CONNECT currently operates with 99.99% uptime, excluding scheduled maintenance, illustrating the level of availability required when infrastructure must support trading activity across longer operating windows.

Execution has to hold together across asset classes, and trading and risk functions need to stay integrated so exposure is visible in real time. Separately, production data from B2TRADER shows how quickly execution workloads can scale.

This works better if the account and back-office layer keeps pace. Always-on brokerage is as much a funding and back-office challenge as a trading one. Client onboarding, deposits and reconciliation need to function across regions and time zones just as continuously as the trading engine does. B2BROKER's B2CORE platform currently supports 344,648 end users and 489,267 active trading accounts, with approximately $4.91bn in client deposits.

Finally, continuous operation demands continuous monitoring. Incident response, risk limits and escalation paths need owners for every hour of the trading day.

The broker readiness test

None of the developments above amount to markets already trading globally, in every asset class, on a genuine 24/7 basis. They are closer to being a patchwork of live services, dated launches still pending regulatory approval, and early-stage regulatory discussion.

But the direction, where it all moves, is clear enough that brokers need to treat always-on readiness as a distinct operating capability, not a byproduct of simply extending a platform's opening hours. Four questions can be a reasonable starting point for that assessment:

• Can the broker measure liquidity quality and execution conditions outside core sessions?
• Are alternative liquidity, routing and hedging options available when conditions deteriorate, rather than relying on a single venue or provider that may itself be thin at that hour?
• Can trading, account, deposit and reconciliation systems operate together across regions, so funding and back-office processes don't become the bottleneck that trading infrastructure no longer is?
• Are risk limits, monitoring and incident-response responsibilities clearly defined for every trading period, including the hours when a broker's own staff are least likely to be watching?

The last two questions highlight the importance of copy-trading activity. Aggregated data from B2BROKER's B2COPY platform shows $191.41bn in copied USD notional and 95.28m copied deals over a recent period. During the peak hour, more than 1 million copied deals were processed, equivalent to an average of approximately 292 per second across that hour. Gold alone accounted for roughly 80% of copied notional and 79% of copied positions. These figures describe B2BROKER's own platform workload, not the broader industry, and the growth in deal counts over the period reflects that workload rather than market-wide adoption.

Extending trading hours is a strategic decision. However, being ready to support it is a separate, harder capability. It's the one that will separate always-on brokers from those that are simply always open.