Having watched the dramatic growth in 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week cryptocurrency trading, TD Ameritrade is enabling retail investors to do the same for a number of ETFs including the S&P 500, Emerging Markets, and Gold.

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TD Ameritrade extended trading hours on its platform starting Monday to 24 hours, five days a week for several popular exchange-traded funds. The e-broker also told CNBC that trading individual stocks around the clock may not be too far away.

CNBC reports that traders on the TD Ameritrade platform are now able to buy and sell shares of ETFs like the SPDR S&P 500 (SPY), iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (EEM) and the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) at any time of the day.

Trades made between 8 p.m. ET and 4 a.m. ET are placed as limit orders and are executed through electronic communication networks.

The move lets the Average Joe buy and sell these ETFs when market-moving news hits overnight rather than waiting until the stock market opens to react to the news. TD Ameritrade's platform is used largely by retail investors.

"What we're doing is creating a seamless session," Steven Quirk, executive vice president of TD Ameritrade's trader group, told CNBC.

"We know there's a lot of news that happens overnight when the market isn't open."

He said that TD Ameritrade would enable 24-hour trading for popular individual stocks, like Apple and Amazon, once liquidity for the SPY and other ETFs during the new session became large enough.

Of course, Quirk is completely correct and perhaps the following stunning chart from Bespoke Investments sums things up best.

(Click on image to enlarge)

Since 1993, if you bought the S&P 500 on the open and sold on the close each day, your return would be -5.2%...

But if you did opposite (bought on the close, sold on the open the next day) your return would be a stunning 568%.

(meaning more than all of the S&P's investment performance came in after-hours trading)