Clock Risk: London Trades 24/7, Do You

There is a woman in Sliema — let's call her what she is, a retail investor with a brokerage account and a mortgage she is quietly managing — who set an alarm for 4 a.m. twice last year to catch a market move before London opened. She caught it once. The other time she missed it by eleven minutes and spent a week regretting it. That particular kind of frustration is about to become extinct.

The London Stock Exchange announced it will launch a new 24-hour trading venue, joining a structural shift that has been building pressure for years. The New York Stock Exchange has been moving in this direction. Nasdaq has been circling it. Now London, the exchange that has been running on roughly the same operating hours since men wore top hats on the trading floor, is admitting what the market already knows: capital doesn't sleep, and the infrastructure built around a nine-to-five bell is a legacy feature, not a design choice.

The mechanism here is straightforward, and the ambition is bigger than it looks. Markets moving to 24-hour trading don't just give you more hours — they remove the artificial information asymmetry that punishes the retail investor and rewards the institutional player who can execute overnight through futures, derivatives, or foreign exchange positions. When a geopolitical event breaks at 2 a.m. and the London market doesn't open for seven hours, the person who loses is the one without the infrastructure to respond. That has always been you, not the hedge fund.

Here is what I actually think is happening: the exchanges are watching the crypto markets — BTC, ETH, SOL trading continuously, globally, without pause — and recognising that a generation of investors has been trained to expect access at any hour. The demand didn't come from institutions. It came from ordinary people who bought their first asset on a phone at midnight. The exchanges are following the behaviour, not leading it.

My call is this: 24-hour equity trading arrives fully within three years across all major exchanges. The transition will be marketed as democratisation. It is partly that — and partly a volume play by exchanges who make money on transactions. Both things are true simultaneously.

For the Maltese investor, this matters more than it seems. Malta operates in a timezone that has always made the New York close awkward and the Asian open painful. Round-the-clock trading levels that geography. If you are building a portfolio, managing a pension, or running a small business with exposure to foreign equities, check what your Malta salary calculator leaves you after tax — because the window to deploy it is about to get a lot wider.

More access is not automatically more advantage. Discipline is still the edge.