Wall Street Never Sleeps: 23-Hour Trading Comes to Australia's Working Day

For as long as Australians have followed Wall Street, it has meant late nights. In Perth the market opens around 10.30 at night; in Sydney, depending on daylight saving, it can be midnight or later. That's about to change.

As I said at the top of this week's Greater Wealth, "What it means, Travis, is that Australians will be able to go on their lunch break during working hours and trade the US market." Travis Carter and I spent the show on what that really changes, and on the part almost nobody is talking about.

In this episode (12 chapters)

1. 00:00Trading Wall Street on your lunch break
2. 01:13What it means for Australians
3. 02:53Tradies, super and ASX commissions
4. 05:14A friend paying $2,000 a month
5. 07:15The options problem: locked out
6. 08:04Watching the market before it opens
7. 14:30Robinhood's CEO on tokenised shares
8. 21:29The catch: thin markets, limit orders, 20% bands
9. 22:30August 2024: the night overnight trading broke
10. 24:48Backup plans
11. 26:30Options, cash flow and dividends
12. 28:10What Derek is building next

What actually happened

Wall Street in the Australian working day

For a lot of Australians this is simply good news. Nobody has to sit up until midnight to watch their positions. As Travis said, "it gives that flexibility for Australians," especially in the eastern states, where most of the population lives and where the hours were always the most painful.

Travis came at it from the trades. He's been a roofer, a finance broker and an insurance broker, and the thing he hears most from tradies is how poorly their super is doing. His point was about cost: "The Australian stock market is extremely expensive for small-time traders just because the commissions are so high." A US market open during business hours puts competition on that, and in Travis's words, "competition is never a bad thing."

It also raises a question we put on the show to anyone with a standard super fund: "do you actually know what it's invested in?" Most people don't. The more of the world's markets that open up during our day, the more that question matters.

The part almost nobody is talking about

Here's my concern. The shares will trade overnight. The options over them won't. As I said on the show, "people who are trading options are not going to be able to trade those options over shares that are on the Nasdaq."

That means there will be hours, in the Australian working day, when someone holding options can watch the underlying shares move and do nothing about it. That's a new kind of exposure. It's why I always talk to my students about what I call the sleep-at-night factor: protection put in place before the market moves, not scrambled for after.

And there's liquidity. Will there be enough buyers and sellers while Americans are asleep? Travis's answer was to look north: China, Singapore, Hong Kong and the rest of Asia all share our time zone. The overnight session may be busier than people expect, and a busy session can still move fast.

The catch: thin markets and new rules

The exchanges know the risks, which is why the overnight rules are tight. "They're going to be limit orders only. You can't do a market order, so to speak," as we said on the show, and the 20% price bands are "a bit of a guardrail against wild prints."

But think about what a 20% band tells you about the moves they think are possible. As Travis put it, "It's still a massive amount, especially if you've got a leveraged account, 20-point movement against you, that's going to hurt."

The night overnight trading broke

This has happened before. On 5 August 2024, during a global sell-off, the main overnight venue for US shares was overwhelmed by volume. It cancelled trades and suspended trading, and reopened only partially at first. In Korea alone, orders worth around 630 billion won across 90,000 accounts were cancelled.

That's why "the serious traders have backup plans as well," as we said on air: a second broker, a second connection, someone who can manage a position if you can't reach the market. Overnight trading is a new door, and doors can jam.

This is general education, not financial advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security.

Where this is all heading

My prediction on the show was that this is a testing ground, and that markets will eventually move to 24/7 trading with instant settlement. Robinhood's chief executive already talks about tokenised shares that trade around the clock and can be moved like crypto assets. Traditional finance and the new technology are merging, and quickly.

What excites me most isn't the technology, though. It's whether people are ready for it. As I put it at the end of the show, "This is preparing people, not just knowing the skills, but having the mindset and more importantly, the character to know how to handle any zeros in an account."

And Travis had the line I'd leave you with: "Always keep moving. Always keep learning because the moment you stop, that's when you lose."

Three questions to ask this week

1. Do I know what my super is invested in, and in which markets?
2. If I hold options over US shares, what happens to my position during the hours the shares trade and the options don't?
3. What's my backup plan if I can't reach my broker when the market moves?

If the second question is a new one for you, it's the one the free masterclass is built around.

Education only. Nothing here is personal financial, tax or legal advice.