As interest in round-the-clock trading grows, panellists at FIA Expo on 18 November explored what 24/7 derivatives markets could mean for exchanges, clearinghouses, brokers and end-users. While crypto derivatives have already pushed parts of the industry into continuous operations, the discussion revealed a range of views on how far the model should extend.
Demand from Retail
Nodal Exchange, a US futures exchange that primarily serves energy markets, moved towards round-the-clock futures clearing earlier this year when its clearinghouse began providing 24/7 clearing support for select cryptocurrency futures listed on Coinbase Derivatives.
Nodal has not extended trading hours for its own contracts into the weekend, but Demetri Karousos, the exchange's president and chief operating officer, told the Expo audience that the move to 24/7 for the Coinbase futures contracts makes sense because it matches the operating hours for the underlying markets.
“We did not push, ask or suggest that we go 24/7 for any of the Nodal Exchange contracts, for power, natural gas or environmental, because those products do not demand it at the moment. And I think that's a pretty important distinction,” said Karousos.
“The thing to keep in mind is that the derivatives markets on crypto have underlying markets which already trade 24/7, so it was creating a bit of an issue for traders who were trying to manage exposures across both markets, not having 24/7 access to derivatives. We thought that was the appropriate use case.”
Adam Hickerson, chief operating officer of Robinhood Derivatives, said weekend trading is one of the most frequent requests from retail traders who already trade crypto at all hours.
“They don’t understand why they can’t trade 24/7 in certain products,” Hickerson said. "Many customers switch between products to hedge or speculate – but find themselves stuck during the 36-hour weekend gap in the futures market, where they are not able to trade or participate, and that is frustrating for them,” he said.
“Retail wants it. They’ve been asking for it for years. The time has come to give it to them.”
Concerns
But extending that model to traditional commodity and financial markets has raised concerns among market makers and institutional firms. Rob Creamer, CEO of Geneva Trading, a principal trading firm, cautioned that many futures contracts are designed to hedge real-world commercial risks. Those markets depend on liquidity that tends to mirror activity in the underlying physical markets.
“Launching 24/7 trading that isn’t going to move in tandem with what's happening in the physical market could create dislocations in price,” he said. “You don’t want farmers or energy producers getting stopped out in the middle of an illiquid weekend session. The purpose of the market has to remain front and centre.”
Joseph Pozzi, a managing director in the futures clearing business at Goldman Sachs, agreed that the benefits depend heavily on the product. While clients with crypto exposure welcome weekend trading, traditional institutional users remain uncertain.
“It needs to make sense for the product to be there. No one wants to get blown out on a crude oil move over the weekend, when there's no physical hedge that they can actively participate in,” said Pozzi. He also noted that banks still rely on weekend windows for system maintenance, making full-scale 24/7 operations difficult under current infrastructure.
For firms that have already made the leap, continuous trading brings new operational disciplines. Karousos said Nodal Clear designed its systems to allow hot fixes – live updates applied without taking markets offline – while preserving a short Friday-night maintenance window and a quarterly extended break to support major systems upgrades.
“Technically speaking, what it means is that you are fixing things in real time, not waiting for a scheduled window, but if we need it, we have that Friday evening time,” he said.
Hickerson said Robinhood uses rolling server restarts to allow maintenance on one while customers are seamlessly migrated to another. “It doesn’t impact trading, but we can still do what we need to behind the scenes,” he said.
Both executives stressed that staffing levels inevitably rise when markets do not close.
Margin requirements
One of the most significant questions is how clearinghouses and clearing firms will handle margin requirements if markets operate nonstop. Pozzi said most weekend-traded crypto futures still follow a Monday margin cycle, leaving firms to anticipate margin calls ahead of the open.
Funding, he added, remains constrained by the simple fact that US Treasury markets and the banking industry's payment systems do not yet operate on weekends. “Tokenized collateral could change that,” Pozzi said. “We all know it’s coming.”
Karousos described Nodal Clear’s approach to risk management for 24/7 crypto futures. He noted that the clearinghouse tracks customer positions in real time and uses pre-trade controls at the matching engine to block trades that would increase exposure beyond approved limits. It also applies variation margin asymmetrically, reducing a customer’s trading capacity when losses accumulate.
“It’s about identifying what’s truly new in a 24/7 environment and building the right tools to solve it,” he said.
Despite technological progress and growing demand in specific pockets of the market, panellists agreed that the move to 24/7 trading will unfold gradually, and only where it makes sense for both users and clearing members.
“There are additional costs,” Karousos said. “In the end, it’s a commercial decision.”
For now, the industry appears aligned on one point: 24/7 futures trading is gaining momentum – but its reach will likely be shaped asset class by asset class, with crypto leading the way and traditional markets moving much more cautiously.
