Night Moves: Proposed ETF Bets Bitcoin Performs Better After Dark

Wall Street wants to sell you the moon—or at least, the night shift.

A new exchange-traded fund proposal is targeting a curious market niche: investors who believe Bitcoin's price action heats up when the sun goes down. The fund's strategy hinges on capitalizing on perceived nocturnal volatility, a pattern some traders swear by but others dismiss as market folklore.

The Nocturnal Thesis

Proponents point to the crypto market's 24/7 nature. While traditional finance sleeps, Asian markets wake and institutional algorithms don't punch a time clock. This around-the-clock activity can create unique liquidity and momentum patterns in off-hours—patterns this ETF aims to harness.

Engineering the Night Owl

The fund wouldn't just hold Bitcoin. Its proposed structure uses a combination of futures, timing mechanisms, and strategic rebalancing to overweight exposure during specific overnight windows. It's a bet on rhythm, not just asset class.

A Cynical Wink

It's the latest in a long line of financial products designed to slice, dice, and repackage risk into something novel enough to command fresh fees. Because if you can't beat the market, you can always just sell a new clock.

The proposal now faces the grueling SEC review process, where regulators will scrutinize whether this is innovative exposure or just a cleverly timed gimmick. For true believers in crypto's after-hours alpha, the wait for approval begins.

Key Takeaways

• The proposed Nicholas Bitcoin and Treasuries AfterDark ETF aims to bottle the overnight performance of the cryptocurrency in an investment vehicle.
• Some research supports the premise of the strategy, but it may not consistently deliver excess returns.

The early bird may get the worm. But does the night owl eat its lunch?

That question is at the core of a proposed exchange-traded fund from Nicholas Wealth called Bitcoin and Treasuries AfterDark. (Approval and launch under the ticker "NGHT" are expected next year.) The strategy aims to capture the performance of the world's largest cryptocurrency while U.S. stock markets are closed, on the belief that bitcoin's (BTCUSD) performance is better in the evenings.

"In a market like we're in now, a lot of the losses have [been] overnight," David Nicholas, president and founder of Nicholas Wealth, told Investopedia. "But in a bull market for bitcoin—that's actually when we see the biggest outperformance."

For investors who have been unhappy with the coin's not-so-hot returns lately, an actively managed strategy could be appealing, and there is some research that suggests bitcoin's overnight performance can exceed the day's. But other numbers suggest that the strategy isn't a slam dunk.

WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU

There's a joke in the ETF world that the arrival of a new strategy is a lagging indicator—meaning that by the time a particular investment approach is identified, and packaged for mass-market consumption, it's over or in the final stages of delivering any alpha.

One study that analyzed five-minute Bitcoin price data from January 2018 to December 2023 found that average overnight returns were 0.093%, better than U.S. trading hour returns of -0.029%. (Crypto markets trade 24/7, with investors across geographies mostly trading during their waking hours.)

If Bitcoin gains are bigger in the U.S.'s off hours, that would indicate meaningfully higher buying activity overseas. That hasn't been the case for most of the past year—suggesting that such a strategy may be unable to deliver excess returns consistently over long periods of time. Other ETFs in the same vein—those that aimed to deliver nighttime performance of stocks—closed roughly a year after launching, in large part because the strategy underperformed.

"If I just want to have Asia-hour exposure, that's cool," Greg Magadini, Director of Derivatives at Amberdata, said about the strategy. "But there shouldn't be any reason for it to outperform or underperform consistently. It's kind of just noise."

Related Education

Paris-based blockchain analytics company Kaiko's data show that U.S. bitcoin trading session returns exceeded both APAC's and London's from January 2023 to December 2025. Trading volumes over the same time period, meanwhile, don't indicate that one region is steering the direction of bitcoin, though the U.S.'s share has touched historical highs in the past year, Kaiko research analyst Laurens Fraussen told Investopedia.

Still, Fraussen said, "there is no structural regime shift in which one region suddenly dominates global [bitcoin] trading volume."