Robinhood pushes toward 24/7 trading: When does one trading day end and another begin?

Robinhood Markets is pushing US stock trading closer to a 24/7 model, raising a bigger question for investors: when does one trading day actually end and the next one begin?

What is new in Robinhood's weekend trading plan?

The retail brokerage plans to let customers trade a selected list of stocks and exchange-traded funds over the weekend, in what would be a first for modern US equity markets. The service will run from Sunday at 8 p.m. New York time through Friday at 8 p.m., with weekend orders routed to a trading venue operated by Bruce Markets.

“Breaking news doesn’t wait for an opening bell,” said Steve Quirk, Robinhood’s chief brokerage officer.

When does one trading day end and another begin?

But longer trading hours do not necessarily mean that the traditional trading day has disappeared.

“The extension of trading time is ‘perceived access’ and does not replace the exchange session,” said Sidharth Sogani Jain, Founder, CEO & Fund Manager at Blue Aster Capital and CREBACO Global.

The conventional US equity session still runs from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. New York time. That 4 p.m. close remains important because it sets the reference price, index levels, corporate actions and the T+1 settlement clock, Jain said.

Robinhood already offers 24-hour weekday trading that resets at 8 p.m. ET. Its weekend initiative essentially seeks to fill the Friday-to-Sunday gap, taking retail investors closer to continuous access.

Yet, the structure of that weekend market could be very different from the main exchange session.

“Saturday and Sunday prints should be read as a thinner, off-exchange session: wider spreads, less depth, and prices that may not hold at Monday’s open,” Jain said.

That distinction could become increasingly important as more brokers and exchanges extend trading hours. Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange and 24X National Exchange are planning longer sessions, with Nasdaq adding a trading window from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m.

Robinhood is also expanding beyond conventional equities. The company plans to offer perpetual futures on select cryptocurrencies, with leverage of up to 10 times on some contracts, through its Bitstamp exchange. It has also announced financial-earnings contracts tied to indicators such as Tesla vehicle sales, subject to final SEC approval.

The push reflects Robinhood’s broader strategy of expanding access to products once largely confined to professional traders.

Still, the weekend experiment highlights a key distinction between trading access and market structure. As Jain put it, “Until clearing and surveillance run on the same clock, 24/7 is convenience, not a new definition of the day.”

Interestingly, weekend equity trading is not entirely new. SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda recently noted that New York financial markets operated Saturday sessions for eight decades, until 1952.

Robinhood may therefore be reviving an old idea in a radically different market: a financial system where the question is no longer whether markets can trade seven days a week, but which market clock investors should actually follow.