On 19 October 2026 Cboe opened two new sessions for options on 24 single stocks and 5 ETFs: a pre-market window from 7:30 to 9:25 and a post-market window from 4:00 to 4:15, Eastern time, Monday to Friday, limit orders only. NYSE American matched it the same day. The 29 names include SPY, QQQ, NVDA, TSLA and AAPL and made up about 53% of US options volume this year (Cboe, The Trade).
It is the first extension of single-stock option hours in the history of the listed market, and it is worth being precise about what it changes.
The arithmetic
A week has 168 hours. The standard session, 9:30 to 4:00 five days a week, is 32.5 of them: 19%. The extended session adds 2 hours and 10 minutes a day on 29 names: 43.75 hours, or 26%. The other 142 hours of the week, and all of the week for every other name, are unchanged. The sessions only open if the underlying has opened, and they do not run overnight, on weekends or on holidays.
So the gap between "when the information arrives" and "when the option can be traded" narrowed from 135.5 hours a week to 124.25 for 29 names. Most earnings still land after 4:15. Most macro data still lands before 7:30. Everything that happens between Friday afternoon and Monday morning still arrives at the open as a single jump.
Where the hours went
The demand for after-hours equity exposure is not hypothetical any more. Hyperliquid's builder-deployed stock and index perps traded $115 billion in July 2026 and carry $3.9 billion of open interest, and about 60% of that volume trades outside US market hours (Coinperps, Allium). Weekends are a small share, about 5% of stock-perp volume, so the demand is for the evening and the early morning, the hours when earnings and guidance land, rather than for Sunday afternoon.
Those traders have a perp. They do not have an option. The listed market cannot give them one, because a listed option is tied to a listed underlying that is itself closed. An option on the perp inherits the perp's hours.
What a 24/7 book changes for the market maker
The usual objection is that a market maker cannot hedge an option while the stock is closed. On the perp it can, every hour. That matters more than it sounds, because a hedger's error grows with the square of the move between re-hedges. A weekend absorbed as one 66-hour jump at Monday's open is a far larger risk than the same weekend absorbed in 66 hourly re-hedges, even though the total variance is the same. Smaller, more frequent re-hedges are a lower cost of carrying inventory, and a lower cost of carrying inventory is a tighter quote.
Our pricer runs on a trading-session clock, so the weekend is not priced as two full days of risk; our hedger re-hedges on every move of the perp, so the weekend is not carried as one. The gap the listed market closed by two hours is the gap we were built for.