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The Nasdaq announced it will begin trading US stocks for nearly 23 hours a day from Sunday 6 December onwards.
The move, still subject to SEC approval, means Nasdaq’s trading day will stretch from Sunday evening to Friday evening with barely a pause.
For European investors, the new window of 9pm to 4am ET will be 3am to 10am CET, meaning Europeans could be trading Nasdaq-listed stocks for almost an entire session before London opens.
Nasdaq already runs extended sessions from 4am to 9:30am, called pre-market session, and 4pm to 8pm ET, named after-hours session, around its core 9:30am to 4pm hours, but access to that early and late trading has largely been exclusive to institutional investors with direct market connections.
Nasdaq president Tal Cohen has framed the expansion as a way to “broaden investor access and expand wealth-building opportunities” for everyone else.
The pitch is also backed by numbers as foreign holdings of US equities reached $17 trillion (€14.6tn) by mid-2024, up 97% since 2019, a surge Nasdaq wants to capture directly rather than cede to platforms already open around the clock.
Traditional exchanges have been under mounting pressure to broaden access and increase available hours.
Geopolitical shocks under the Trump administration have repeatedly landed when Wall Street was shut, most notably when US and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites were announced on a Saturday morning in February, forcing traders onto crypto exchanges and decentralised platforms to price oil, gold and silver in real time.
Those venues, along with newer tools such as tokenised real-world assets, which are digital tokens representing ownership of stocks, bonds or commodities, and perpetual futures contracts that let investors bet on an asset’s price with no expiry date, have shown that demand for round-the-clock trading does not wait for exchanges to open.
Nasdaq is also not moving alone.
Rival NYSE has already won SEC approval for a 22-hour day running from 1:30am to 11:30pm ET, while Cboe, the largest exchange for options contracts in the US, has outlined similar ambitions.
Nasdaq first signalled its own intent to go nearly continuous back in March with this week’s announcement filling in the details.
The new evening session serves as the first concrete building block, opening the market for nearly 23 hours in a five-day trading week, as the exchange ultimately wants to offer 24/7 trading.
Mdxhealth SA (MDXH) announced on Friday that the company received an additional notification letter from Nasdaq related to the recent reduction in the price for the company’s ordinary shares.
The initial notice was related to the company’s non-compliance with the $1
AMR Resources Acquisition raises $250M in Nasdaq SPAC IPO
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South Korean chipmaker SK hynix, known for its high-bandwidth memory chips, is preparing to raise roughly $28 billion (€24.5bn) on Wall Street, a sum surpassed only by SpaceX’s record flotation last month.
It is an extraordinary outcome for a firm that once survived on job cuts and asset sales.
Pricing is due on Thursday, with trading expected to begin on Friday under the ticker SKHY.
SK hynix is issuing 17.79 million new shares in the form of American depositary receipts (ADRs), each representing a tenth of a Seoul-listed share, and cornerstone investors including Baillie Gifford and funds run by Coatue Management have signalled interest in up to $7 billion (€6.1bn) worth of stock.
The target was trimmed from an initial $29.6 billion (€25.9bn) after the shares slipped in recent weeks.
ADRs are certificates traded on a US exchange that stand in for shares held abroad, letting American investors buy into a foreign company without dealing in a foreign currency or market.
Unlike a conventional flotation, this is not SK hynix’s stock market debut. Its primary listing remains on Seoul’s Kospi index, and the Nasdaq offering simply opens a second, dollar-denominated avenue for investors to gain exposure.
The listing arrives with the company already worth more than $1 trillion (€876bn), a threshold also crossed by rivals Samsung Electronics and Micron, after a surge of more than 200% this year.
Proceeds will fund new fabrication plants, chiefly a vast cluster in Yongin, plus its first US packaging facility in Indiana.
The move is partly about valuation. Korean-listed chipmakers have long traded at a discount to American peers, and a Nasdaq listing offers a chance to close that gap.
The AI build-out has transformed the industry’s economics.
As hyperscalers pour hundreds of billions into data centres, memory prices have exploded, with DRAM up 44% and NAND flash up 53% in a single quarter, according to Citi Research, and manufacturers have already sold most of their 2026 production.
SK hynix reported first-quarter revenue above 50 trillion won (€29bn) and operating margins north of 70%, figures unheard of for a chipmaker, and commands about 60% of the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) market, according to Counterpoint Research.
Yet the timing is delicate.
Memory has always been a brutally cyclical business. The AI-driven rally that transformed SK hynix has begun to wobble as chip stocks sold off sharply across Asia last week, and Samsung lost more than $100 billion (€87.5bn) in market value despite posting a record profit.
Investors are increasingly asking whether the vast sums being spent on AI infrastructure will earn a return, a question that the Bank for International Settlements raised in late June when it warned that the boom could seed the next financial crash.
Those concerns are not new for SK hynix.
SK hynix traces its roots to Gukdo Construction, founded in 1949, which moved into electronics in 1983 as Hyundai Electronics, an arm of the Hyundai empire.
The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s brought disaster. Under an IMF-backed restructuring of the Korean economy, Hyundai absorbed rival LG’s semiconductor business, creating a giant that promptly buckled under its own debts.
Salvation came in stages.
Renamed Hynix Semiconductor in 2001, a contraction of “high” and “electronics”, the firm cut jobs, shed assets and split from Hyundai. Profits returned, but the violent swings of the DRAM market left it perpetually exposed.
Starved of capital, it was rescued in 2012 by the telecoms conglomerate SK Group, becoming SK hynix. The takeover proved decisive. SK Group poured money into high-bandwidth memory, then a costly and unprofitable technology that few believed in.
Today it has become the scarcest commodity in AI computing. And the firm employs nearly 46,900 people.
Additional sources • AFP
Midday Need to Know: Birthright citizenship upheld, SK Hynix files for Nasdaq IPO & more
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The moment that Wall Street had anticipated all year arrived on Friday as SpaceX, the AI and aerospace company controlled by Elon Musk, began trading publicly on the Nasdaq in the largest initial public offering (IPO) in the history of financial markets.
In a speech before the New York session opened for trading, Musk stated that SpaceX’s goal is to “take the fiction out of science fiction.”
SPCX opened at $150, over 10% above its $135 IPO price, and it was already at more than $160 after the first few minutes of live trading.
The company confirmed on Thursday that it had priced 555.6 million Class A shares at $135 each, valuing the firm at roughly $1.78 trillion (€1.54trn) and targeting a raise of $75 billion (€64.5bn) that instantly eclipsed Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion (€25.4bn) listing, which had stood as the global record for almost seven years.
Only around 3% to 4% of SpaceX shares are currently available for public trading.
The company earmarked as much as 30% of its offering for retail investors, including 10% dedicated to European buyers, but the final amount was set at 20%. As for options contracts on SPCX, they are scheduled to begin trading next week.
The IPO has also brought Elon Musk closer to becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
Forbes valued his pre-IPO SpaceX stake, estimated at around 42% of the company, at about $500bn (€435bn). At the IPO valuation, those holdings are worth roughly $690bn (€600bn), adding nearly $190bn (€165bn) to his fortune and pushing his net worth closer to the $1tn (€870bn) milestone.
Along with Musk, thousands of SpaceX employees are benefitting from the IPO and becoming millionaires.
The listing will give millions of savers indirect exposure to SpaceX as the company is expected to qualify for major stock market indexes shortly after its debut, meaning its shares could be automatically purchased by index-tracking funds.
SpaceX is estimated to be fast-tracked into the Nasdaq-100 in less than a month, as opposed to a typical wait of as much as a year.
Nasdaq’s new fast-entry rule, introduced in May, now sees it evaluating newly listed stocks for potential entry by ranking their market capitalisation on the seventh trading day and assessing whether they would rank within the top 40 index members.
SpaceX is already in the top 10.
Among other changes announced, the rule that requires companies to float a minimum of 10% of their shares was also scrapped.
Analysts estimate that funds tracking the Nasdaq-100 will be required to purchase at least $7bn (€6bn) worth of SpaceX shares around the inclusion date, creating a wave of mechanical demand.
SpaceX has also already become eligible for inclusion in both the Russell US Equity Indexes and the FTSE Global Equity Index Series under the newly announced fast-entry rules from the index provider FTSE Russell.
The S&P 500, however, will not adopt a similar fast-track approach.
S&P Dow Jones Indices confirmed in early June that it would maintain its 12-month seasoning requirement and GAAP profitability test, meaning SpaceX will not join the index before mid-2027.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
This article does not constitute financial advice, always do your own research and invest according to your specific circumstances.
As SpaceX and Anthropic eye public listings, index providers brace for major market dislocations.
When mega-cap companies go public, index providers and investors will see it as dropping battleships into the old fishing pond. The resulting waves are going to soak everyone.
Privately held artificial intelligence (AI) vendor Anthropic announced its filing of a draft registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an initial public offering at a later date. According to the company’s website, Anthropic has not decided on the number of shares it will offer, nor at what price. The company recently closed a $65 billion fundraising round, valuing the company at $965 billion post-money.
The news comes as the SEC published SpaceX’s revised Form S-1 on the market regulator’s EDGAR database. The conspicuously absent OpenAI reportedly is filling out its underwriters bench for a possible September IPO. The AI company reached a post-money valuation of $852 billion, according to CNBC.
If index providers add these firms that would instantly become one of the 10-largest listed companies by market cap before their trading prices stabilize, it could cost them dearly due to resulting massive price dislocations.
“Leaving out a mega-cap company means the index is not doing its job,” James Angel, associate professor and faculty affiliate at Georgetown University’s Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy, tells Global Finance. “It thus makes sense to include a big IPO fairly quickly.”
“Big IPO” is not an understatement. Wall Street consensus expects SpaceX’s IPO to result in a market capitalization between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion, would lower Meta’s and Tesla’s rankings in the10-largest Nasdaq-100 Index components by market capitalization while move Micron Technology out of the Top 10. If rumors of a SpaceX-Teslamerger prove true, only Nvidia, Alphabet, and Apple would have a larger market capitalization than the resulting $3.4 trillion behemoth.
Nasdaq has already addressed the mega-cap issue by updating the methodology for inclusion in its Nasdaq-100 Index, which represents the 100 largest Nasdaq-listed non-financial companies, in May.
Among the major changes made by Nasdaq was introducing quarterly index reconstitutions in March, June, and September, in addition to its regular December reconstitution. Nasdaq has also incorporated a “Fast Entry” pathway for new listings that rank among the top 40 of the current Nasdaq-100 constituents by full market capitalization, based on both listed and unlisted shares.
“These companies are evaluated on their seventh trading day and, if eligible, added shortly thereafter, with all existing liquidity requirements still applying,” explained Emily Spurling, Global Head of Index at Nasdaq Global Indexes, in an interview posted on the Nasdaq website. “The quarterly rebalance handles the broader population of eligible companies; Fast Entry ensures the index can respond in a timely way when a company of significant scale enters the public market.”
SpaceX stock could see its highest price jump not on June 12, its reported IPO day, but on July 7, the earliest it could be added to the Nasdaq-100 Index, according to The Motley Fool’s Sean Williams.
“Taking into account the Juneteenth (June 19) and Independence Day (July 3) holidays for the stock market, the 15th trading day, including its IPO day, is July 6,” he wrote. “Index funds that attempt to mirror the market-cap-weighted Nasdaq-100 will be required to purchase a jaw-dropping number of shares after this 15-day period comes to a close. Mandatory purchases from exchange-traded funds and index funds are estimated at $22 billion to $27 billion.”
“Nasdaq made the biggest change in the Nasdaq-100 rules as an inducement to listing on Nasdaq,” says Angel. “The other index providers have no similar incentive to shorten the seasoning period. I get the impression they are just doing it to make their indices more reflective of what is going on in the market.”
Meanwhile, S&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P DJI) is mulling methodology changes to its S&P U.S. Indices and Dow Jones U.S. Total Stock Market Indices. The company is considering whether to implement a “narrowly defined rule exception for MegaCap companies and adjustment to the IPO seasoning period,” according to a prepared statement.
The index vendor defines mega-cap companies as those with a market capitalization equal to or greater than the 100th largest company in the S&P Total Market Index, which was approximately $150 billion at the start of June.
According to reports from Bloomberg News, the major consideration is whether to reduce the seasoning period for IPOs before they are eligible for inclusion in an index to six months from 12 months
The consultation period ended on May 28, and any changes that S&P DJI proposes to implement would take effect “prior to the market open on Monday, June 8, 2026, unless otherwise announced,” the statement continued.
The company declined to comment beyond its published statement.