24-hour trading is coming – is your advisory practice ready?
“Clients in the regions that can take advantage of trading during their day – APAC and MENA regions – it is creating an environment of overnight speculation,” he said. “However, the opportunity to hedge positions or react to market-moving events, before the rest of the world can react, is an opportunity.”
The infrastructure problem nobody talks about
St. Clair is direct about where the real friction lies. It is not simply a matter of markets staying open longer. The deeper challenge is whether the back-office systems that support advisory firms can handle the complexity that 24-hour markets introduce.
“This has been the biggest roadblock for some firms,” he said. “The inability to sync their back offices to support local markets on a T+0 basis, as well as overnight sessions that represent trades on the following day – allocating client buying power between sessions and ensuring the accuracy of their books and records proves challenging. This does call for system overhauls and operational changes.”
Settlement timing adds another wrinkle. The U.S. moved to T+1 settlement in May 2023, while the United Kingdom still operates on T+2 – a gap that creates real complexity for advisors serving clients across both markets. The upcoming shift in UK trade settlement is expected to help, St. Clair noted, but for now, the mismatch demands careful attention to client liquidity.
What advisors should actually do
For long-term wealth managers whose investment philosophy is built around patient capital and disciplined rebalancing, round-the-clock trading need not mean round-the-clock activity. St. Clair sees the value for this cohort as primarily defensive rather than tactical.
