US stock exchanges are open 9:30am to 4pm Eastern on weekdays, which comes to roughly 1,650 hours a year out of 8,760. Call it 19 percent. A 24/7 market, like the stock perpetual futures on Hyperliquid, trades the other 81 percent too, weekends and holidays included.
The world doesn't pause to match exchange hours. Earnings drop after the close on purpose. Politics happens on weekends. Asia trades while America sleeps. Brokers have stretched the trading day to cover more of that, and the weekend is still the part nobody in the traditional system has closed.
The official hours, and the unofficial ones
Regular session: 9:30am to 4pm Eastern. Around it sit pre-market from as early as 4am and after-hours to 8pm. Trading there is legal but thin: spreads widen, orders are usually limit-only, and one moderate order can move a price in ways it never would at noon.
Overnight trading came next. Robinhood, Webull and Moomoo now route selected stocks through overnight venues, covering roughly Sunday evening to Friday evening. Call it 24/5. It's real progress with one hard edge: everything still stops for the weekend. Friday 8pm arrives and the door locks for two days, right when 48 hours of news is about to pile up.
Gaps: where closed hours send the risk
A closed market doesn't stop prices from changing. It stops you from trading while they change. The change arrives all at once at the next open, as a gap, and gaps are where the pain concentrates.
Hold a stock through its earnings report and you know the feeling. Micron reports after the close. Netflix can gap double digits before regular hours resume. Whatever the stock does in reaction, you watch it happen and act after. The memory sector adds a second variant: its biggest players report and trade in Seoul, so the US names gap on news that broke while the Nasdaq slept.
None of this is the market being unfair. It's the mechanical consequence of hours. Risk keeps moving overnight, so a market that closes hands the whole move to whoever is holding at the next open.
What 24/7 changes
Crypto settled whether continuous markets can work. Bitcoin has traded every second of every day for over fifteen years, through every crisis, without an opening bell. Hyperliquid carried that model over to perpetual futures, stock perps included, and Based connects you to those markets from a self-custody wallet.
In a 24/7 market there's no gap, because there's no close for a gap to form across. Earnings reactions are tradable as they happen. Weekend news is tradable on the weekend. You still take losses when you're wrong, but you take them while you can still act.
It's also fairer. Exchange hours favor people whose job is trading between 9:30 and 4 in New York's time zone. A continuous market treats a trader in Singapore, a nurse on night shift and a fund manager the same way. The market is open when you are.
The fine print
Liquidity isn't uniform around the clock. A Sunday 4am order book is thinner than a Tuesday afternoon one, everywhere, on every venue. Size positions accordingly.
What trades 24/7 through Based are perpetual futures on Hyperliquid that track stock prices, not the shares themselves. That's what makes the hours possible: contracts on an always-on decentralised platform rather than shares in a system that sleeps. You get price exposure without ownership, leveraged positions can be liquidated, and funding fees apply while positions are open; the perps guide explains both. To place a trade over a weekend, the weekend trading guide has the steps, and every market is open now.