The US market just booked a longer shift. Is your desk rostered on?

From December 2026, US equities are set to move to near-round-the-clock trading – Nasdaq’s approved model stretches the trading day to 23 hours, five days a week, sitting on top of a clearing system that has already been guaranteeing overnight trades since late June 2026. In this thought leadership piece, Nova CMX Chief Commercial Officer Gaurav Mehta unpacks what this shift actually means for firms operating in this space – and why it matters more for Australian desks than most realise.

The new US overnight session lands roughly between 11am and 6pm AEST, meaning what the rest of the world treats as “overnight” is actually prime Australian business hours – turning what has traditionally been a dead zone into a live intraday trading and hedging window for Sydney, Singapore and Hong Kong desks. Gaurav also flags an operational wrinkle that deserves more attention than it typically gets: because the ASX settles on a T+2 cycle while the US moves to T+1, a client funding a US purchase by selling ASX shares can find the US leg settling a day before the local sale delivers cash – a funding gap that firms will need to actively manage, not treat as a footnote.

Beyond the operational and compliance considerations, the article makes the case that this shift is a genuine commercial opportunity – spanning commission on volume clients already generate elsewhere, financing and margin income on overnight positions, securities-lending revenue from overnight borrow demand, and client retention as broker panels get rationalised around who can actually execute around the clock. Gaurav closes by laying out three realistic postures firms can take between now and December – building full in-house capability, partnering with a venue or prime broker already active in the overnight session, or deliberately sitting out with a documented, reviewable decision – and argues that the real risk isn’t choosing the “wrong” posture, but failing to make a deliberate choice at all.