When Markets Never Sleep: Extended Hours, Odd Lots, and the Infrastructure Implications of Always-On Markets

Capital markets are moving closer to continuous operation. Extended trading hours, rising odd-lot activity, sub-penny pricing, fragmented liquidity, and AI-driven workflows are increasing the pressure on the systems firms use to capture, process, analyse, and act on market data.

Infrastructure built around defined trading sessions, batch cycles, and overnight recovery windows is being challenged by a new operating reality: more data, more granularity, more venues, more real-time decisioning, and less time to pause.

Join Alexander Unterrainer of DefconQ, and Conal Doyle from KX for a discussion on what these changes mean for market data infrastructure — and how firms should think about building for always-on markets.

The session will explore where existing architectures start to struggle, why fragmented stacks are becoming harder to scale, and what architectural principles matter most as firms modernise for real-time analytics, continuous market operations, and AI workloads.

What we cover

• How extended trading hours and always-on markets are changing infrastructure assumptions
• Why odd lots, sub-penny pricing, and rising message volumes matter for market data systems
• What happens when traditional recovery windows and overnight batch cycles begin to disappear
• Where fragmented data and analytics architectures become bottlenecks
• How firms should think about performance, resilience, interoperability, and simplicity
• The role of unified platforms like KDB-X in supporting real-time, historical, and AI workloads at capital markets scale