By Friday afternoons, the atmosphere on commodity trading desks undergoes a significant shift. For the first four days of the week, traders focus on profiting from their bets. However, by Friday lunchtime, their attention turns to assessing the level of risk they can tolerate until markets reopen on Sunday evening.

The possibility of unexpected events, such as a new war, election results, or sudden OPEC announcements, can significantly impact trading positions. As a result, traders must carefully manage their risk exposure during this period.

According to Mustafa Al Niama, former head of digital assets at Goldman Sachs, 'From about lunchtime, the desk essentially stops thinking about making money and starts thinking about what they can live with for roughly forty-eight hours until the Sunday evening reopen.' This ritual is familiar to every commodities options trader, who must consider whether they are comfortable holding their position over the weekend, given the inability to adjust or rebalance their bets during this time. Terry Duffy, chairman and CEO of CME Group, notes that 'risk, geopolitical or not, does not know what day of the week it is.' However, markets still largely operate on a traditional schedule, and planning for potential weekend and after-hours catastrophes has long been part of a trader's job.

Earlier this year, an unusual event occurred in the oil options market, disrupting this long-standing routine. As tensions escalated between Iran and Israel, traders flocked to crypto exchanges over the weekend to trade derivatives contracts called 'perpetual futures,' which operate around the clock.

The total value of all active contracts on the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid hit a record $1.2 billion on March 8, a Sunday when traditional commodity markets were closed. While weekend volume is still smaller than on weekdays, it is no longer negligible.

This shift highlights the emergence of a 24/7 venue for oil derivatives trading, which is not yet available in traditional finance. Researchers at Energy Aspects note that the dynamics of how traders price short-dated West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude options are set to change due to the rapid growth of perpetuals on crypto exchanges.

For years, the implied volatility of WTI contracts fell on Fridays, as traders were reluctant to pay for protection through options or derivatives that they couldn't actively manage while markets were shut. However, with the availability of perpetual contracts, traders can now hedge their exposure over the weekend, potentially leading to a decrease in the 'weekend effect' in short-dated WTI options. In theory, this could create an opportunity for traders to capture profits over the weekend if the market becomes chaotic, rather than simply holding their positions. Energy Aspects estimates that if a continuous futures contract is available, it would create roughly 40% more hedging sessions over the life of a typical contract.

While finding any edge to capture a few basis points of profit sounds like any trader's dream, for most traders, it's still likely to remain theoretical until continuous trading becomes more widespread. Even traders who find the strategy plausible are cautious not to overstate its impact. One trader at a proprietary market-making firm notes that 'is volatility coming down because of that [availability of perps]? I don't think so.' However, he acknowledges that having more touch points for picking up and laying off risk over the weekend is valuable for traders.

The main issue is that institutional traders are still hesitant to enter the market due to a lack of meaningful liquidity. The volume of perps linked to traditional assets such as commodities and stocks has increased, but it's still likely not large enough for giant Wall Street trading firms to profit.

For example, in March and April, the average volume of crude oil perps accounted for about just 2% and 4%, respectively, of the primary futures contract equivalents traded on traditional exchanges. Meanwhile, in 2025, total perps trading volume on centralized exchanges was $62 trillion versus spot volume of roughly $19 trillion, according to Pantera. Decentralized exchange (DEX) Hyperliquid has supercharged the use of perps, with monthly perps volume of nearly $200 billion.

While those are massive numbers for crypto, they are still relatively small from Wall Street's perspective. The hardest thing about trading is finding someone who wants to take the other side, and in the absence of traditional liquidity providers, it's challenging to get a bet on big enough to care about the result. Large institutions, such as banks, already have systems in place for the market's traditional operating hours, but they will need a different structure for weekend trading.

Having the option to trade does not mean that people would automatically start doing so; there needs to be a broad shift in operational capacity from institutions and corporations to cater to that. One of these structural issues might be how institutions operate (or don't operate) on weekends.

Banks are closed on Saturdays and Sundays, so it would be hard to collect margin for perps trading mid-weekend. These large institutions would need the backing of clearing and settlement rails that actually move money, which is, for now, mostly on weekdays.

Even when weekend trading is available, much of the financial infrastructure that these large institutions rely on still isn't. The biggest challenge may not be keeping the markets open; it's keeping the financial system underneath everything open as well.

So, in the meantime, who is actually trading perps? For now, these instruments remain in the domain of crypto-native firms, proprietary trading shops, and savvy retail traders. Predominantly, it's the same typical retail, market makers, prop shops that are trading perps, probably using them mostly for basis trading or carry trades, rather than hedging. Because it is a very lucrative delta-neutral type of trade.

There is, however, another important role that perps play for traders that didn’t exist before. They give traders a tool to gauge how the market will trade when it opens if news breaks out during the weekend.

Before perps, it was mostly a guess of how an asset would trade once the traditional market opens. But now, because perps trade 24/7, traders at least have a better idea of the bets’ direction after the weekend. The perps will be a pretty good indicator of where the market is heading.

You have some direction. This might be the first signal that perpetual futures are starting to influence traditional markets — not as a replacement for CME, but as another source of price discovery while the rest of the market sleeps. Perhaps the biggest impact of perps thus far is that the instrument might be influencing how some traders behave. For the crypto industry, it actually is a big deal because for the longest time, we as an industry have always been the student.

However, perps might become one of the first ideas moving in the opposite direction, where traditional finance is potentially influenced by crypto innovations. Whether perps can actually reshape the traditional market remains uncertain. Volumes (at least by TradFi measures) are still modest, and big-money institutions are still cautiously watching.

Meanwhile, CME's proposed 24/7 futures contract trading remains uncertain. But there are signs that on Friday afternoons, old habits are already beginning to change for traders. They will still spend the end of the week worrying about the weekend — the difference is that if there are continuous trading hours, some of them may no longer have to spend time waiting. Now, they can start making money either by trading or tracking these contracts.

For lots of players, for example, a hedge fund or quant shop, if you can just have your strategies run instead of five days a week, seven days a week, that's two extra days of trading. So if you can have alpha, bring it on. And it seems, at least in the future, one assumption appears less permanent than it once did: that Friday's closing bell marks the beginning of two days when traders simply have to wait.

I think that markets will be 24/7 down the road. All markets.