You can't buy actual US shares on a weekend, but you can trade their price. The NYSE and Nasdaq close Friday at 4pm Eastern and reopen Monday at 9:30am, while perpetual futures on Hyperliquid that track stocks like NVDA and TSLA keep trading straight through. Based connects you to those markets.
Picture Saturday morning. A story breaks that's obviously going to move a stock you care about. You open your brokerage app and the one button you need is grayed out until Monday. Regular trading runs 9:30am to 4pm Eastern, Monday through Friday. Add up the holidays and the market is open fewer than 1,700 hours a year. The other 7,000 or so, every weekend included, it's closed.
Why the market closes at all
History and plumbing. Exchanges grew up as physical places with human staff, and everything around them (clearing firms, settlement, market makers) was built on the assumption of a daily close. Trades still settle on a next-day cycle, and the industry uses nights and weekends to square its books.
None of that is about you. It's infrastructure built decades ago. Crypto markets, built from scratch on different plumbing, have run 24/7 from day one.
What a weekend order at a broker does
Every major brokerage lets you place an order on the weekend. You're joining a queue. The order sits there until Monday's open and executes at whatever the price is then, not the price you saw when you tapped the button.
That gap matters. If news lands over the weekend, the stock can reopen far from Friday's close, and your queued market order fills at the new price. You carry the weekend's risk with no way to react to it.
Some brokers now offer overnight trading on weeknights. Robinhood runs a 24 Hour Market from Sunday 8pm to Friday 8pm Eastern on selected stocks, and Webull covers similar ground. Helpful on a Tuesday night. No use on a Saturday, because both pause for the weekend.
How to trade stock prices on a weekend
The markets Based connects you to don't close. They live on Hyperliquid, a decentralised trading platform, and run continuously, weekends and holidays included. Based itself is a self-custody wallet, not a broker.
The instrument is different from a share. These are perpetual futures, contracts that track a stock's price on the Hyperliquid network. You get the price exposure, long or short, but you don't own the underlying share, so there are no dividends and no shareholder votes.
Access is permissionless: no brokerage account, no bank account, just a self-custodial wallet funded with USDC. The wallet is an app that holds funds only you control, and USDC is a digital dollar. Setting one up on Based feels like any finance app: you log in with your email or Google account and the wallet is created for you.
A first weekend trade goes like this. Set up the wallet and fund it with USDC. Open the stock you want from the full list of markets. Pick long or short and a size, and check the liquidation price before you confirm. None of it waits for Monday.
Things to know before your first weekend trade
Weekend prices are real prices. The price moves with news and with buyers and sellers instead of freezing at Friday's close, so expect it to drift from the last exchange print, especially when something is happening.
Liquidity varies by hour. A quiet Sunday morning trades thinner than a Tuesday afternoon, so large orders move the price more. Every 24/7 market behaves this way. Size for it.
Perps are derivatives with leverage available. A leveraged position can be liquidated if the price moves far enough against it, and funding fees apply while positions are open. The perps guide covers both. For why exchange hours work the way they do, read stock market hours vs 24/7 trading.