Matthew Lynn, a Post Opinions contributor, is a financial columnist and author who writes for the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator in London.
If you wake up in the middle of the night with an overwhelming desire to buy Apple stock, or Elon Musk appears in your dreams and asks you to invest in SpaceX, you will soon be able to purchase shares without waiting until morning. Starting next month, Nasdaq and NYSE Arca, the electronic-only trading platform primarily for exchange-traded funds, will switch to (almost) all-night trading. The city that never sleeps will finally have a market that never sleeps either.
The change might seem like a minor tweak designed mostly for insomniacs. However, it signals something more significant: Wall Street is close to becoming not only America’s stock market but also the world’s — and that is a prize well worth having.
In the days when news traveled slowly and trades were shouted across a trading floor by men in ties, there were stock exchanges in Cleveland, Louisville, Honolulu and even D.C., which merged with Philadelphia’s in the 1950s. A few still exist, but trading is now concentrated mostly in New York. National exchanges around the world are fading away, too. The Italian, French and Dutch exchanges have already been folded into Euronext, while the London Stock Exchange tried to merge with Germany’s Frankfurt exchange in 2017. It is not hard to see why. In a world of instant global communications, it makes sense to trade the world’s equities in a single market.
There could have been plenty of credible candidates for that role. London would have been one, given how old its market is and how much confidence investors have in British law. But the British government took the exchange out of contention by imposing a 0.5 percent tax on nearly every trade. Likewise, Zurich could have been an option, given its political neutrality and prestigious financial sector. If your money is not safe in Switzerland, it’s not safe anywhere. But Zurich never quite gained momentum as an option.
The winner is likely to be New York. Wall Street now dominates the global equity markets in a way that has received little attention. The United States accounts for 62.7 percent of the value of nearly all the shares listed in the world as of mid-2026, an increase of more than nine percentage points since 2016, even though the U.S. generates only about a quarter of global gross domestic product.
Nearly every other country’s share of equities is going backward. Britain is the biggest loser, accounting for just 3.1 percent of global equities — less than half its total a decade ago — along with Japan, down from 8.1 percent to 5.6 percent. A few smaller markets, such as Israel, Taiwan and India, have slightly increased their share. But they are still tiny compared with the U.S.
America’s dominance is growing, with new companies raising more money on the American market than anywhere else in the world. That number is only increasing with massive initial public offerings of companies such as SpaceX and, soon, Anthropic. Even a decade ago, Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange were just two of several major exchanges. Now they are the only ones that really matter.
It is not hard to understand why that happened. A long bull run in U.S. equities, reflecting strong American growth, has meant that the U.S. share of global equities keeps rising. Nine of the 10 most valuable public companies in the world are listed on American stock exchanges.
The U.S. has also become the market of choice for international companies. Arm Holdings, one of Britain’s biggest firms, is listed in New York instead of London, and the German shoemaker Birkenstock chose New York over Frankfurt. A virtuous cycle is underway. Investors are on Wall Street, so companies get higher valuations on American exchanges. More companies list there, attracting more capital.
But does that matter?
The answer is surely yes. More than 50 years ago, French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing described the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency as an “exorbitant privilege,” given the benefits it had generated for the American economy. Hosting the world’s stock market will give the U.S. a similar advantage. High trading volume will generate huge fees, pay lavish salaries and create tax revenue. It will strengthen the dominance of American banks and settlement systems. And it will cement the role of the dollar, given that all the assets on Wall Street exchanges will be denominated in the currency.
The U.S. should be working harder to collect the prize. All-night trading will help, since most of the world is in different time zones. Wall Street should give other major countries a say in securities regulation. Perhaps most of all, countries need guarantees that assets won’t be weaponized against them by the White House. No country wants to contemplate suddenly losing its largest businesses.
Of course, Wall Street’s dominance of the global equity market could still come to an end. A 1929-style crash could blow it up. So could a retreat into economic nationalism. Barring either of those, however, the world is moving toward a global market — and Wall Street will own it.
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