The time scale is at least a thousand times faster than necessary for your retirement savings to be safe.
The problem of investment companies selling stupidly at 3am solves itself as they either learn or go bankrupt. And the counterparties making money off those dumb moves don't need to be 'connected'.
I'm saying that insider knowledge isn't necessary to make money in this kind of situation, and probably doesn't even help very much. If a bunch of people trade like idiots and cause wild swings when there's no liquidity, you can provide liquidity and make money.
Any overnight mispricing is going to become an arbitrage opportunity for market makers, hedge funds, and HFT firms...whom will then compete with each other to mine that arbitrage opportunity until profits go to zero, solving the market inefficiency and mispricing problem over time (and by over time, I mean like probably the first few nights and then it stops being an issue forever).
In other words, a liquidity-based mispricing that happens consistently every night is going to quickly stop being mispriced since its so predictable.
The other way to think of it is that these parties are essentially middle men who make a cut of the difference whenever someone buys/sells far from market price.
Basically if you mis price something they screw you rather than the counter party who would be interested in taking the other side at market.
I think this is stupid and does not add value, but I don't think it's harmful. It's like the stocks equivalent of a junk flipper.
Yes, when you correct a mispricing in markets that is a valuable service and you tend to get paid in proportion to the mispricing you correct (this is why markets work so well, they provide dynamic incentives in a decentralized way).
In case you aren't aware, a world outside the US exists on different time zones and also invests in US capital markets.
Having 24/7 trading a massive value-add for the entire world who also invests in US companies, which benefits US companies tremendously given they will continue sucking up the world's capital.
This is yet another reason why global companies will continue going public in US markets instead of their own. Meanwhile Europe will continue struggling to form a capital markets union over the next 50 years while they slowly translate legal documents back and forth to each other in 42 languages, growing the fine dining economy of Brussels more than their domestic economies.
If you're not trading overnight and there's a flash crash that corrects itself overnight... it's the people who are trading overnight taking money from each other.
Most Americans who invest money don't trade at all. They pay some guy at a bank to do it, and the guy at the bank is exactly the kind of guy who is trading at 3am.
Most people are in simple retirement year funds which have a set algorithm which decides by simply rebalancing to follow an index and appropriately mitigating risk by shifting some assets towards bonds.
There is no one trading on a whimsy. The mutual fund founding documents specify an exact time of day (or times) at which the fund gets rebalanced and it simply follows the algorithm..
The price shocks discussed here will not affect that
Most of the time things will work as they are supposed to and arbitrage will work as a damper. Every once in a while you'll get a self-reinforcing loop and then it will work as an a run-away amplifier.
24/7 trading will definitely burn a lot of extra energy in datacenters, make some speculators a little richer, and make a LOT of retail investors nervous…
But what actual real-world problem will it solve?
I for one am skeptical that more liquidity is always good. I think that having achieved $0.01 spreads, we're well-past the point of diminishing returns with high-frequency trading.
That wouldn't be enough liquidity, and also wouldn't solve the problem if the auction happened at a specific time. Day traders would all put in their bid at the last possible moment.
What solves the day trading problem is doing chunked actions at random small intervals (like between 2-7 seconds). Then you can't put your bid in at the last moment because you won't know when it is. So your best bet is to put in your bid when you've chosen a price, knowing that it will resolve within seven seconds or less.
I do see your point regarding timing, but I don't see why daily isn't enough liquidity when, for decades, funds from trades have taken multiple days to clear.
The very existence of holiday weekends shows that it's actually totally fine if you go 72 hours without any trades resolving.
There are whole books on this, but the short summary is that there are infinite times when information can change that would affect the value of a company. Anything less than infinite trading is a compromise where the price is no longer reflective of the value. The bigger the gap in the time, the bigger the gap between price and value.
For example, if you could only trade once a day, let's say a company announces midday that some huge customer has just left their platform. Their price should drop, but without trading it can't. So now everyone knows that their value is lower, but can't do anything about it. So people who own that stock will hold their money and not make other trades, because they know they are going to lose a bunch when trading happens again.
> The very existence of holiday weekends shows that it's actually totally fine if you go 72 hours without any trades resolving.
Trading never stops. There is an entire secondary market that has after hours/weekend trading, and a tertiary private market when that one isn't open. It's just you (and all the other retail traders) who can't trade.
Which if anything proves the opposite of your point. Liquidity is so important that wealthy people set up an entire system to keep trading just so they can still have it.
> But what actual real-world problem will it solve?
I know most Americans don't travel, but are you aware that timezones exist and there's an entire world outside the US that also invests in US companies?
Why do you think global companies want to list in US capital markets instead of their own? Being the world's most desirable capital markets is a massive boon for the US economy and 24/7 trading will only accelerate this trend.
> I know most Americans don't travel, but are you aware that timezones exist and there's an entire world outside the US that also invests in US companies?
Not only am I dimly aware of the existence of these not-the-US places, but I actually live in not-the-US.
No, they stop hunt their way to depressed prices where they then buy anticipating the recovery while you closed out your “safe” retirement positions at -15%.
You use a trailing stop loss. You get closed out 15% down from the top, not 15% down from purchase. The alternative in a 24 hour market is worse — the news of a real event hits and by the time you wake up and respond you’re down 50% or more and the stock isn’t coming back.
This policy change is to hunt profit from a safety mechanism used by retail traders.
It is something that should yield a lot of profit for 24 hour trading systems during a downturn.
You don’t put stop losses on retirement positions, period.
Doing that literally any time in the last 30 years would have been a dumb idea if you weren’t retiring in the next year.
You would have gotten stopped out and then what? What magic crystal ball do you use to decide to get back in?
Look at the violent downturn during COVID. You would have been stopped out and then likely would have taken a loss and missed one of the largest bull markets in history.
Stop losses with or without trading are for day traders.
In the past, stupid situations on Wall Street have not resolved that way; they've resulted in disasters that cause economic harm to many people in the country and the world. Though sometimes people on Wall Street do make money from those situations.
