Bitcoin doesn't care what day it is. SPY does.
That gap sounds obvious — until you're staring at a MSTR ticker on Binance Futures at 2 a.m., it looks tradeable, and you go in. By morning, slippage has eaten your profit. That's the trap nobody warns you about clearly enough.
Equity Perps Are Not Crypto
BTC, ETH, SOL trade 24/7. Volume exists at 3 a.m. on a Sunday. No arguments there.
SPY, QQQ, MSTR — different animal entirely.
These instruments on Binance Futures are called equity perps — perpetual futures wrapped around real stocks and ETFs that live on US exchanges. When the NYSE is closed, the underlying asset isn't moving. And when the underlying isn't moving, the perp's price stops reflecting the real market. It doesn't drift slowly. It freezes.
Technically, these instruments are still "open." Practically, you're trading into a void.
Volume Is Your Entry and Exit — Not Just a Statistic
Here's the number that matters: $10,000,000 in daily volume. That's the floor for trading a Binance Futures contract without getting punished by slippage — where you get the price you see on screen, not the price a thin order book decides to give you.
During US market hours, equity perps hit that threshold. Spreads are tight, market makers are active, order books are live. Fine to trade.
After hours? Volume dries up fast. Spreads widen. Order books go thin. You can enter a position — but exiting at a fair price becomes a gamble. That's not hyperbole; it's the structure of these instruments working against you when conditions aren't right.
What Changed in the BSS Rankings
We made one focused change to how equity perps appear in the rankings.
US stock-based instruments now only show up during active American session hours — from pre-market (30 minutes before NYSE open) through end of day. In UTC terms, roughly 13:30–20:00 UTC on weekdays, excluding NYSE holidays.
Outside those hours, they drop off the list entirely.
Not because of a bug. Not a delisting. They disappear because trading them outside market hours means trading into illiquid conditions — and we'd rather not surface that as an opportunity when it isn't one.
Simple rule: no session, no coin in the rankings. Volume comes back, the coin comes back.
What To Do When a Stock Perp Is Missing
If you open the rankings and SPY or MSTR isn't there — the US market is closed. That's it. Wait for the NYSE session to open, volume will return, and the instruments will reappear. Then you look for an entry.
Rushing into a thin order book isn't trading. It's just a slow way to lose money.
Instruments Currently on the NYSE Schedule
These are the equity perps following this rule right now:
- SPY — SPDR S&P 500 ETF, tracks the 500 largest US companies
- QQQ — Invesco QQQ, Nasdaq-100 ETF (top 100 US tech companies)
- SOXL — Direxion Semiconductor Bull 3×, leveraged semiconductor ETF
- EWY — iShares MSCI South Korea ETF, Korean companies listed in the US
- MSTR — Strategy (MicroStrategy), the largest corporate Bitcoin holder
- INTC — Intel, processor and chip market veteran
- MU — Micron Technology, DRAM/NAND and HBM memory for AI
- MRVL — Marvell Technology, networking and AI semiconductors for data centers
- SNDK — SanDisk, flash storage and drives
- SKHYNIX — SK Hynix, leading HBM memory manufacturer for AI accelerators
- CRCL — Circle, the issuer behind USDC stablecoin (IPO'd in 2025)
More are coming — Broadcom (AVGO), Nokia (NOK), CoreWeave (CRWV), Western Digital (WDC) and others. All follow the same rule.
On paper, these instruments trade around the clock. In practice, they run on a schedule. The rankings now know that schedule — and surface it to you directly instead of letting you discover it the hard way at 2 a.m.
Every coin has its time. Trade them in theirs.
Originally published on buysellstyle.com
