“24/7 is inevitable. And you can fight it. You can say, I don't like it. I don't want to stay up at two in the morning. But risk doesn't know what time of day it is. … The biggest problem with 24/7 is the banking system. … There's nobody on the planet that could pre-fund on a Friday a $76 trillion market as the banking system is closed. … Unless we have a true 24/7 banking system, we won't have 24/7 markets.”
Odd Lots · Money & Markets · October 2026
Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal asked who, beyond traders and the exchange, would have to stay awake for round-the-clock trading. Duffy says crypto can already trade 24/7 because it is small enough to pre-fund. Equities and rates have to wait for the banks.
Transcript
Can we go back to 24-7 trading for a second? Because this came up on our hyperliquid episode. And I think I
…of demand out there. A lot of guys in their basement, I guess, who want to trade stuff at 2 a.m. in the morning. Guys and girls. Guys and girls, sir. My question is: who else, other than the guys and girls in the basement and the exchange, has to stay awake all weekend to make this actually happen?
I believe, to be honest with you, and I've been saying this for quite some time: 24/7 is inevitable. And you can fight it. You can say, I don't like it. I don't want to stay up at a desk. I don't want to stay up at two in the morning. But risk doesn't know what time a day it is. Risk doesn't happen. Every day ends in a why. I mean, we don't know when that's going to come. The biggest problem with 24-7 is the banking system. The banking system needs to be available 24-7. We're talking about an equity market in the United States alone. It's a $76 trillion market. There's nobody on the planet that could fund, pre-fund on a Friday a $76 trillion market as the banking system is closed. Now, that's an extreme. I can pre-fund a crypto market. A crypto market's small. So we do, and we trade at 24-7. But there's a lot of products that you cannot trade rates and probably for sure equities until the banking system decides to go 24-7. Now, there's real-time payments. There's some other things that the Fed is doing. I spent an hour and a half with Chair Atkins on Tuesday talking about a couple of these things. But it's just not enough unless we have a true 24-7 banking system. Then we will have 24-7…
What's one thing you could go back and talk to yourself at the start of your career? Piece of advice you'd give to yourself based on what you know now.
You know what? I've been pretty fortunate. When you go broke when you're a kid in 1981, I lost $150,000 and I didn't have a dollar. And that was borrowed. So it taught me a lot of discipline, and it's helped me deploy what I've done today in my trading career and as an executive running a company…
I know the buzzer went off, but I'm going to squeeze in one more question. Just because we teased war stories with Terry Duffy, if you look back over your career, I can think of so many crisis moments. I mean, really, just in the past 20 years or so, we had 2008, obviously, 2020, negative oil, all…
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