By Matt Connor
Can You Trade US Stocks 24 Hours a Day?
Can you trade US stocks 24 hours a day? Almost. The four windows explained, with data on which hours the tape prints and how wide spreads get overnight.
You can trade US stocks for close to 24 hours a day on a weekday, though not in one continuous market. Four separate windows sit end to end: a pre-market session, the regular session, an after-hours session, and an overnight session that runs while New York sleeps. Each window has its own venues, its own list of eligible tickers, its own order-type rules, and its own liquidity. Only one of them produces the official closing price.
The four windows in a US trading day
All times below are New York time, the clock every US venue publishes against.
- Pre-market runs 4:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.
- Regular session runs 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. This is the only window with an opening auction and a closing auction at the listing exchange.
- After-hours runs 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
- Overnight covers 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. the following morning, Sunday evening through Friday morning.
The first three have existed for decades and are what most brokers mean by extended hours. Our after-hours and pre-market trading guide covers those two shoulders in detail. This page owns the fourth window.
Overnight orders do not reach the regular books at the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq. They route to venues built for that window. Blue Ocean ATS has run an overnight book for US equities for several years and reports its executions to a FINRA trade reporting facility. 24X National Exchange won SEC approval in late 2024 to operate a near round-the-clock exchange, and the large listing exchanges have published plans of their own for longer weekday sessions.
Two limits follow from that structure. Every venue publishes an eligibility list, weighted toward large US stocks and exchange traded funds, and every broker layers a narrower list on top: a stock you can trade at 2:00 a.m. through one broker may be unavailable at that moment through another. And no venue runs a literal 24 hours. Overnight books pause for a maintenance break each evening, and everything stops from Friday evening until Sunday evening.
Which hours does the US tape actually print?
The consolidated tape is the official record of US trades, and it is not a 24 hour record. Below is every New York clock hour that carried at least one printed share in five of the market's most heavily traded names, over the week of July 13 to July 17, 2026.
The exact SQL behind every number
WITH (
SELECT sum(volume)
FROM global_markets.delayed_stocks_minute_aggs
WHERE ticker IN ('AAPL', 'MSFT', 'NVDA', 'SPY', 'TSLA')
AND window_start >= toDateTime('2026-07-13 08:00:00', 'UTC')
AND window_start < toDateTime('2026-07-18 00:00:00', 'UTC')
) AS week_shares
SELECT formatDateTime(toTimeZone(window_start, 'America/New_York'), '%H:00') AS et_hour,
round(toFloat64(sum(volume)) / 1000000, 1) AS volume_millions,
round(100 * toFloat64(sum(volume)) / toFloat64(week_shares), 2) AS pct_of_week
FROM global_markets.delayed_stocks_minute_aggs
WHERE ticker IN ('AAPL', 'MSFT', 'NVDA', 'SPY', 'TSLA')
AND window_start >= toDateTime('2026-07-13 08:00:00', 'UTC')
AND window_start < toDateTime('2026-07-18 00:00:00', 'UTC')
GROUP BY et_hour
ORDER BY et_hourPrints landed in 16 of the 24 hours on the clock. The earliest was the 04:00 hour and the latest the 19:00 hour. Between those two the tape ran continuously. Outside them these five names printed nothing at all.
The shape matters as much as the coverage. The 04:00 hour carried 7.4 million shares, 0.59% of the week's total across the five. The 19:00 hour carried 0.18%. The chart is a tower with a nearly flat floor on either side of it.
The missing hours are the overnight window, and their absence is a reporting mechanic rather than a claim that nothing changed hands. Overnight executions are reported to a FINRA trade reporting facility, which is itself shut at those hours. The reports go out when it opens the next morning and carry the next business day's trade date. An overnight print never lands in an hour bucket of its own.
How thin is trading outside the regular session?
Volume is the cleanest measure. Seven household names over the same week, split by where on the clock each share printed.
SPY did the most of its week outside the regular session: 2.64% of its shares before the 9:30 a.m. open and 10.6% after the 4:00 p.m. close. The regular six and a half hours still took 86.76%. At the other end of the list, KO put 96.68% of its week into the regular session alone.
One day at half hour resolution shows the same thing as a picture. NVDA on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, from the first pre-market print to the last after-hours print.
The exact SQL behind every number
SELECT formatDateTime(toStartOfInterval(toTimeZone(window_start, 'America/New_York'), INTERVAL 30 MINUTE), '%H:%i') AS et_time,
round(argMax(close, window_start), 2) AS price,
round(toFloat64(sum(volume)) / 1000, 0) AS volume_thousands
FROM global_markets.delayed_stocks_minute_aggs
WHERE ticker = 'NVDA'
AND window_start >= toDateTime('2026-07-14 08:00:00', 'UTC')
AND window_start < toDateTime('2026-07-15 00:00:00', 'UTC')
GROUP BY et_time
ORDER BY et_timeThe first bucket, 04:00, printed 408 thousand shares and ended at $205.3. The last, 19:30, printed 118 thousand and ended at $211.8. All 32 buckets of the day sit on the chart, and the volume bars do not lift off the axis until the regular session opens.
Do bid ask spreads widen outside regular hours?
A bid ask spread is the gap between the highest price a buyer is publicly willing to pay and the lowest price a seller will take. It is the cost of trading immediately. Below is AAPL's quoted spread on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, sampled at seven points on the clock. Each reading is the average spread inside a minute, then the median minute of that hour, in basis points. A basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point.
The exact SQL behind every number
WITH per_minute AS (
SELECT toStartOfMinute(toTimeZone(sip_timestamp, 'America/New_York')) AS et_minute,
avg((toFloat64(ask_price) - toFloat64(bid_price))
/ ((toFloat64(ask_price) + toFloat64(bid_price)) / 2)) * 10000 AS avg_spread_bps
FROM global_markets.cache_stocks_quotes
WHERE ticker = 'AAPL'
AND sip_timestamp >= toDateTime('2026-07-14 08:00:00', 'UTC')
AND sip_timestamp < toDateTime('2026-07-15 00:00:00', 'UTC')
AND bid_price > 0
AND ask_price > bid_price
AND toHour(toTimeZone(sip_timestamp, 'America/New_York')) IN (4, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18)
GROUP BY et_minute
)
SELECT formatDateTime(et_minute, '%H:00') AS et_hour,
count() AS quoted_minute_count,
round(quantileDeterministic(0.5)(avg_spread_bps, cityHash64(et_minute)), 2) AS median_spread_bps,
round(quantileDeterministic(0.9)(avg_spread_bps, cityHash64(et_minute)), 2) AS p90_spread_bps
FROM per_minute
GROUP BY et_hour
HAVING count() >= 5
ORDER BY median_spread_bps DESCThe widest hour of the sample was 18:00, where the median minute quoted 10.25 basis points and the widest tenth of minutes quoted 13.98. The tightest was 14:00 at 0.85. The rows are ordered widest to tightest, and reading that order top to bottom is the lesson on its own: the same stock, on the same day, costs a different amount to trade depending on the hour you reach for it.
Bid ask spreads covers the number itself, and why spreads widen at the open covers the mirror image at 9:30 a.m. Wide quotes are one of the conditions present when a stock opens far from where it closed, which overnight gaps takes up separately.
What 24 hour trading does not mean
- Not every ticker. Eligibility lists are set per venue and narrowed again per broker, and they change.
- Not every order type. Overnight books generally accept limit orders only. Market orders and stop orders are unavailable in that window at most brokers.
- Not an official price. The closing price of record is struck in the listing exchange's closing auction at 4:00 p.m. Index levels and fund valuations are struck from that print, and an overnight execution does not move it.
- Not options. US listed equity options keep their own, shorter session. A small set of index option products trades into the overnight hours; single stock options do not.
- Not a full 24 hours. There is a maintenance pause each evening, and the whole apparatus is dark from Friday evening to Sunday evening.
US market hours from Tokyo, Hong Kong and Sydney
This question arrives most often from readers whose working day sits on top of the US night. New York is the anchor. From the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November, New York runs on daylight time, four hours behind UTC.
- Tokyo, 13 hours ahead: the regular US session runs 10:30 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. the next morning. The overnight session runs 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., an ordinary Tokyo working day.
- Hong Kong and Singapore, 12 hours ahead: regular session 9:30 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. Overnight session 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
- Sydney, 14 hours ahead in July: regular session 11:30 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. Overnight session 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Both hemispheres change their clocks, on different dates. Check the current offset again in November and in March. US stock market hours worldwide keeps the fuller list of local equivalents. US stock market hours covers the standard calendar, and market holidays and early closes covers the days that calendar bends.
FAQ
Can you trade US stocks 24 hours a day?
Close to it on weekdays, across four separate windows rather than one market. Pre-market runs 4:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. New York time, the regular session 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., after-hours 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., and an overnight session covers 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. on eligible tickers at venues that support it. Nothing trades between Friday evening and Sunday evening.
Does overnight trading set the closing price?
No. The official closing price is struck in the listing exchange's closing auction at 4:00 p.m. New York time. Overnight executions are reported to a FINRA facility and carry the next business day's trade date, which is why they do not appear in an overnight hour on the tape.
Which stocks can be traded overnight?
Each overnight venue publishes its own eligibility list, generally weighted toward large US stocks and exchange traded funds, and each broker applies a narrower list on top. Two accounts can differ on whether the same ticker is available at the same minute.
How much wider are spreads outside regular hours?
On AAPL on July 14, 2026, the widest hour of the seven sampled was 18:00, where the median minute quoted 10.25 basis points, against 0.85 in the tightest hour, 14:00. Thin windows quote wider, and a single order can move the quoted price further than the same order would at midday.
Do options trade overnight?
US listed equity options keep their own session, shorter than the equity day. A small set of index option products trades into the overnight hours. Single stock options are not part of the overnight equity session.
Every hour bucket and spread reading above comes from a stored query. Open the SQL under any panel and run it yourself on the Strasmore terminal.