The new fee filing says Nasdaq’s planned Night Session will run 9 p.m.–4 a.m. ET, Sunday through Thursday, in a system environment separate from the 4 a.m.–8 p.m. Day Session. Firms need dedicated FIX Trading, OUCH or CORE FIX ports, plus separate purge and DROP ports if they use them. Existing monthly fees are $575 for FIX/OUCH/CORE FIX, $500 for purge and $550 for DROP; the first five of each applicable type per MPID are now waived, as are the first five corresponding test ports. SEC filing
The waiver is sensible onboarding economics. It also risks making connectivity look like the project. The real inventory is longer: session calendars, order identifiers, trading dates across midnight, instrument/reference-data rollovers, independent kill switches, drop-copy reconciliation and the one-hour gap between day close and night open. Separate purge connectivity is a useful hint from the exchange about how separate it expects your controls to be.
There is a topology question too. Five free ports of each type may cover the intended first deployment, but “free” should not decide the failure domains. If production, disaster recovery and monitoring share an MPID or infrastructure boundary, the sixth port’s few hundred dollars will not be the expensive part of an incident.
Finally, December 6 is planned, not unconditional. Nasdaq says operation still depends on the equity-data plans being ready and a further rule filing confirming exchange compliance. Certification work can begin before that; a production launch cannot be inferred from a port order. Nasdaq implementation alert
The useful action now is to model the night session as a new venue environment, not another row in the hours table. Markets have a habit of becoming 24-hour chiefly by creating fresh definitions of “end of day.”