Nasdaq is looking to expand their existing trading hours with a night session that adds 7 extra hours overnight; this change will likely happen in Q2 of 2026. The normal day session will end at 8pm like normal and then there will be a one hour break and then it will resume at 9pm for the night session. This night session will allow trading overnight all the way until the 4am pre-market open. (and that means through London open at 3am EST) A bunch of day-traders on social media are freaking out about this change and many believe that this will affect the New York open volatility. The way things are now, we already have 5 and a half hours of trading before the New York Session open for price discovery. Yet there is still a huge flood of volume right at New York open. This is because a lot of institutions aren’t actually allowed to trade until the 9:30 am auction. A lot of big players like mutual funds, pensions, and ETFs aren’t allowed to trade until 9:30 am because of fiduciary duty, slippage risks, etc. And that’s because the venue that non-regular hours trading takes place in is fundamentally different from the venue of regular hours trading. In the off hours you’re trading on an ECN (Electronic Communication Network) which is a computerized system that automatically matches buy and sell orders for securities and eliminates the need for third party involvement. And in these off hours, market makers (mutual funds, ETFs) aren't forced to quote, so liquidity is very thin. That’s why even though we have all of this time before market open now, we still get a huge dump of volume right at 9:30 am. For this reason I don't think an extra 7 hours of ECN super low volume trading time is going to do anything to change that initial 9:30 am liquidity dump. Because no matter how many off hours of trading we get, the regular session is still going to be fundamentally different. And that 9:30 auction is still going to be the start of high volume trading.