📌 SEC Prepares Mechanism for Near Around-the-Clock U.S. Stock Trading
The SEC plans to hold a preparatory roundtable on near around-the-clock U.S. stock trading, with discussion focusing on specific implementation mechanisms and the impact of extended trading hours on stock tokenization. This is worth watching because if trading rules change, prices will no longer be formed primarily during traditional trading hours; how liquidity is distributed and whether transaction prices at different times are more likely to diverge will become questions of market structure.
At present, the key issue is not the concept of “whether 24-hour trading is possible,” but who provides bid and ask quotes and when, how price volatility is controlled when trading is sparse, and who bears the system and compliance costs generated by extended operating hours. The roundtable itself does not mean the rules have already been implemented, but it indicates that the discussion is entering the implementation level.
On-chain markets already have a more aggressive experiment: Robinhood’s design places U.S. small-cap stock tokens and meme assets into liquidity pools, allowing stock token prices to connect directly to the on-chain liquidity of crypto assets. Such an arrangement may increase trading channels outside traditional hours, but it also means that changes in crypto-asset liquidity may be transmitted more directly to stock token prices.
The intersection of these two developments is that if trading hours, tokenization, and liquidity arrangements evolve simultaneously, the boundaries of cross-market price discovery will become more blurred. Their actual impact still awaits verification through regulatory documents, platform rules, and real transaction data; in particular, it is necessary to examine the legal rights corresponding to the tokens and whether liquidity pools can maintain effective quotes under stress.
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