IMF Tokenized Stocks Study: 24/7 Demand, 80% Fractional Trades and Liquidity Risks
More than half of trading in the tokenized equities examined by the International Monetary Fund occurred outside regular U.S. equity-market hours. Approximately 80% of transactions were smaller than one conventional share. Those are substantial signals of what users want from a tokenized stock: a way to trade when U.S. exchanges are closed and a way to buy a fraction of an expensive share. The same study finds that these markets are considerably less liquid and roughly 1.5 times as volatile as the equivalent traditional stocks. That matters for anyone assuming that round-the-clock access necessarily improves execution quality. The results appear in Chapter 3 of the IMFs October 2026 Global Financial Stability Report, Scaling Tokenization: New Efficiencies, New Vulnerabilities, publicly discussed ahead of the full report release. Public discussion intensified in October 11 reporting. The IMFs empirical observations deserve close reading because they answer a different question from recent exchange launches: how do tokenized stocks actually trade after they exist？What the IMF measured The IMF compared five liquid tokenized U.S. equity-linked instruments with corresponding conventional assets, using products from Ondo Finance and xStocks. The exercise covered 11 centralized and decentralized trading venues, 365 trading days, and more than two million five-minute observations of prices
