The SEC has written down what happens if the consolidated tape misses its December deadline, and the answer is that one exchange may trade all night from January 24 with no consolidated quotes at all

Overnight trading was supposed to arrive with the tape already switched on.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has now written down what happens if it is not. In an order dated August 7 and filed for publication on Thursday, the Commission granted 24X National Exchange temporary conditional exemptive relief that would let it open its overnight session on January 24, 2027 even if the three plans that run the consolidated tape are not ready. The order says plainly what it is: a contingency, should the equity data plans be unable to implement the extended hours amendments on December 6, 2026.

The session in question runs from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. Eastern on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights before a business day. The Commission approved rules for it in the order registering 24X as a national securities exchange, Release No. 101777 of November 27, 2024, and the session has never opened. The exchange began trading on October 14, 2025 and runs three of its four sessions, all of them inside the hours the tape already covers. Three other exchanges have been approved for overnight trading on the same condition, and none of them has opened either.

What the relief actually suspends

The Commission notes that this is novel, and the reason is narrow. No national securities exchange currently operates its trading system at a time when the exclusive processors are not collecting, consolidating and disseminating consolidated data. 24X asked to be the first.

So the relief lifts, for that window only, the quotation requirements of Rule 602 of Regulation NMS, the corresponding reporting obligations under the UTP and CQ plans, and the exchange's own rules forbidding it to open the session before the plans are ready. Those own rules matter because section 19(g)(1) of the Exchange Act requires a self-regulatory organisation to obey its own rulebook, which is why an exemption from an exchange rule has to come from the Commission rather than from the exchange.

The seven conditions

The order attaches seven. 24X must publish a proprietary real time feed carrying both quotation and last sale information for the overnight session, at no cost. It must state on its website that consolidated market data is not currently available for quoting activity in those hours and that the only source is its own feed. It must keep meeting the ordinary rules in its other three sessions, report overnight trades to the tape on the delayed basis the plans already permit, and hand the Commission quarterly data on overnight quoting and trading volume. The National Securities Clearing Corporation must have Commission-approved rules for clearing and settling those trades, which it received on May 27. And before opening, 24X must file a rule change confirming it can comply with the Exchange Act and with these conditions.

The second condition is the one a reader should hold on to. An exchange operating overnight under this order would be required to tell the public, on its own website, that the consolidated quote for those hours does not exist.

The dates

December 6, 2026 is when the plan participants must comply with the extended hours amendments the Commission approved in June, which stretch the processors to 23 hours a day, five days a week. The plans have told the Commission they expect to be ready by then.

January 24, 2027 is when this relief takes effect if they are not. There is a gap between the two dates, and the order closes it explicitly: if the plans miss December 6 but implement before January 24, the relief never becomes effective at all. It expires in any case on the earlier of the day the amendments are implemented or July 2, 2027.

One other clock is running underneath all of this. Under the exchange's own rule 1.5(c), as extended in May, 24X has until December 27, 2026 to file the rule change that opens the session. If it does not file by then, the rule says the exchange will promptly move to delete the overnight session from its rulebook.