r/quant
How should quants redefine a “trading day” when U.S. equities move to 23/5?
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Nasdaq plans to introduce a 9:00 p.m.–4:00 a.m. ET overnight session, creating 23 hours of continuous weekday trading with only a one-hour pause for processing and trade-date rollover. The execution implications are obvious, but I think the data implications may be more important for systematic research. Many existing pipelines quietly assume that there is a meaningful overnight boundary: • Daily bars have an obvious cutoff • End-of-day features are calculated after the market stops • Corporate actions and reference data are updated during a quiet period • Reconciliation and maintenance jobs run while no new trades arrive • Overnight returns and regular-session returns are structurally distinct With 23/5 trading, defining a “day” becomes a modeling decision. For example, should a 1:00 a.m. trade belong to the previous U.S. session, the next calendar date, or a separate overnight session? That choice could materially change daily returns, volatility, gap features, volume profiles, event labels, and even whether an apparent signal survives. My current view is that session boundaries should become explicit model parameters rather than invisible data-vendor defaults. I would also expect regular, overnight, and combined sessions to require separate assumptions for spread, depth, fill probability, and slippage. For people working with institutional equity data or...
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[comment u/WildAnatomy] this is a solved problem for most CME futures (ES, Treasuries, Commodities), so I would be surprised if any serious firms struggled with this on the data and modelling side tbh.