SEC's Selway Says Markets Are Moving Toward 24/7 Trading

Jamie Selway, the SEC's director of the division of trading and markets, said Friday that financial markets are moving toward round-the-clock trading, pointing to tokenized securities and perpetual futures as products arriving alongside that shift.

The statement is a direction of travel, not a mandate. Selway offered no deadline and no rulemaking text on Friday, and he attached a caveat that anyone reading it as policy should carry along: his remarks "do not necessarily reflect the views of the SEC, its commissioners or other colleagues" in the Trading and Markets division.

He also redrew the map of who sets price. Retail investors and passive asset managers now carry a larger role in markets than they did in the past, Selway said — two very different sets of flow, arriving through two very different hands.

What does 24/7 trading change operationally?

A market that never closes needs a settlement, surveillance and custody stack that never closes with it.

That single sentence carries the operational weight of everything Selway described. Weekend and overnight coverage becomes a permanent cost rather than an occasional one, staffing moves from a standard session to a rotating multi-time-zone desk, and the places where errors surface — funding, margin, corporate actions, index rebalancing — stop having a natural 5 p.m. Eastern cutoff to hide behind.

For issuers and exchanges, the shift changes what a listing agreement, a clearing arrangement and a corporate-action notice have to cover. A business day no longer defines the clock.

Where does central clearing fit?

The piece closest to a hard deadline sits in Treasuries.

Selway said central clearing is nearing implementation in the U.S. Treasury market — the point where dealers stop netting bilaterally and start clearing through a central counterparty.

The consequences reach further than dealer balance sheets. Clearing compresses the collateral and funding arrangements running through the cash market, and it concentrates counterparty risk in a place regulators can supervise directly, which is generally the reason the reform exists at all.

Some proposals to reform the U.S. national market system remain under review, Selway said. That sentence leaves the actual timetable open: whether the reform lands as a final rule, as a proposal, or as something reshaped before it gets there.

How is research changing?

Selway also described how market research is changing, and his framing was less romantic than the usual automation pitch.

"As data volumes grow," he said, researchers are devoting "more effort to processing large amounts of information than to locating unique data." Researchers are increasingly using artificial intelligence tools, he added.

Read together, those two claims describe a reversal of where the edge used to sit. When information is abundant and differentiation is scarce, value moves from the analyst who finds the signal to the desk that can process the pile — which is why the tooling, rather than the hunch, becomes the differentiator.

What does this change for a compliance or research team?

Practically, continuous trading plus model-driven research widens the surface area where something breaks quietly.

A market that trades through the night no longer has a natural low-liquidity window to absorb a bad print, and a research process that leans on a model inherits that model's blind spots at exactly the hours nobody is watching.

The direction Selway pointed to is not in doubt, even if the authority behind it is. Central clearing in Treasuries is close to implementation, tokenized securities and perpetual futures are already entering markets, and the question facing market structure is no longer whether trading moves toward 24/7 but who builds the plumbing that carries it.