By Friday afternoons, the atmosphere on commodity trading desks begins to shift. For the first four days of the week, traders focus on making profitable bets. However, by lunchtime on Fridays, their attention turns to managing risk until markets reopen on Sunday evenings. The concern is that significant events, such as geopolitical news or unexpected announcements, can occur over the weekend, leaving traders unable to adjust their positions until trading resumes.
According to Mustafa Al Niama, former head of digital assets at Goldman Sachs, 'From about lunchtime, the desk basically 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 assess whether they are comfortable holding their position over the weekend, given the inability to adjust or rebalance bets during this time. As Terry Duffy, chairman and CEO of CME Group, notes, 'Risk, geopolitical or not, does not know what day of the week it is.' However, markets have traditionally operated on a weekday schedule, with traders planning for potential weekend and after-hours catastrophes as part of their job. Earlier this year, an unusual event in the oil options market disrupted this long-standing routine. As tensions between Iran and Israel escalated, oil-linked futures experienced a sudden spike in volume over a weekend in March.
Traders turned to crypto exchanges to trade 'perpetual futures,' which operate around the clock. The total value of active contracts on the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid reached 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 influencing traditional finance.
Researchers at Energy Aspects note that the dynamics of pricing short-dated West Texas Intermediate crude options are changing due to the growth of perpetuals on crypto exchanges. The implied volatility of WTI contracts, which previously fell on Fridays, is now narrowing. Traders can hedge options exposure over the weekend, reducing the need to liquidate positions before Friday's close.
This development has implications for the 'weekend effect' in short-dated WTI options, where implied volatility is structurally depressed on Fridays. The availability of perpetual contracts allows traders to capture profits over the weekend if the market becomes chaotic, rather than simply holding their positions. Energy Aspects estimates that continuous futures contracts could create approximately 40% more hedging sessions over the life of a typical contract. While finding an edge to capture a few basis points of profit sounds appealing, most traders consider this strategy theoretical until continuous trading becomes more widespread.
One trader from a proprietary market-making firm notes that the ability to hedge over the weekend is valuable, but the impact on volatility is uncertain. The trader agrees that having more touchpoints for managing risk over the weekend is beneficial, but the lack of meaningful liquidity is a significant challenge for institutional traders.
The volume of perps linked to traditional assets has increased, but it remains relatively small from Wall Street's perspective. For example, in March and April, the average volume of crude oil perps accounted for about 2% and 4%, respectively, of the primary futures contract equivalents traded on traditional exchanges.
Meanwhile, the total perps trading volume on centralized exchanges was $62 trillion in 2025, compared to spot volume of roughly $19 trillion, according to Pantera. Decentralized exchange Hyperliquid has seen monthly perps volume of nearly $200 billion, according to DeFiLlama data.
While these numbers are significant in the crypto space, they are still relatively small for Wall Street. The hardest challenge in trading is finding a counterparty, and in the absence of traditional liquidity providers, it is difficult to get a sizable bet on.
Large institutions, such as banks, have systems in place for traditional market hours, but they lack the infrastructure for 24/7 trading. Even if weekend trading has sufficient volume, they need a different structure for it. DWF's Martin Lee notes that having the option to trade does not mean people will automatically start doing so, and a broad shift in operational capacity is necessary for institutions to cater to continuous trading. One structural issue is how institutions operate on weekends.
Banks are closed, making it challenging to collect margin for perps trading mid-weekend. Clearing systems largely keep weekday hours, and firms cannot summon additional capital on a Saturday afternoon. CME's Duffy emphasizes that the biggest challenge is keeping the financial system underneath the markets open. For now, perps remain in the domain of crypto-native firms, proprietary trading shops, and savvy retail traders.
These instruments are mostly used for basis trading or carry trades rather than hedging. Perps play a crucial role in gauging how the market will trade when it opens if news breaks out during the weekend. Before perps, it was mostly a guess, but now traders have a better idea of the bets' direction after the weekend. The emergence of perpetual markets has become another source of information before traditional markets reopen.
The trader at the proprietary market-making firm notes that it is no longer a surprise by Sunday's open, as traders increasingly watch crypto markets throughout the weekend to gauge where traditional futures may begin trading once the CME opens. This shift might be the first signal that perpetual futures are influencing 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 is that they might be influencing how some traders behave.
For the crypto industry, this is a significant development, as it may be one of the first ideas moving from crypto to traditional finance. Whether perps can reshape the traditional market remains uncertain, but there are signs that old habits are changing for traders.
On Friday afternoons, traders will still worry about the weekend, but with continuous trading hours, some may no longer have to spend time waiting. They can start making money by trading or tracking these contracts.
As Flow Traders' Hein Tibosch notes, '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.' The future may see markets operating 24/7, and it is time for trading desks to prepare for an around-the-clock market, forgetting the old routine of the 'weekend effect.'