The overnight U.S. equities market is quickly becoming one of the most significant developments in trading, as investors demand greater flexibility to access markets beyond the traditional session. In an interview with Traders Magazine, Jason Wallach, CEO of Bruce Markets, outlined the execution and liquidity challenges still to be addressed, and why he sees overnight trading becoming an increasingly established part of U.S. market structure.
How would you describe the current state of the overnight U.S. equities market today?
The overnight U.S. equities market has moved decisively beyond the experimental stage. This is now a real and rapidly scaling market, with meaningful liquidity, global participation and a clear use case for both overseas investors who want to trade U.S. securities and domestic investors who want to trade as soon as information becomes available. Across the broader market, total overnight trading volume has nearly doubled over the past year. On Bruce ATS, the growth has been even more pronounced: in April, average notional per session reached approximately $517 million, average volume rose to 12.5 million shares per session and average symbols traded climbed to roughly 2,200 per session. All of those figures have grown more than tenfold in the past six months alone.
What’s exciting is that volume growth is only part of the story. The infrastructure around overnight trading is now catching up to the demand, and that is where the market can really begin to mature. We are seeing broader broker adoption, more sophisticated routing, new order types, stronger market data solutions and growing institutional engagement. As more institutions enter the market and more firms build for multi-venue access, overnight trading should become continuously deeper, more competitive and more resilient. That is the next phase: not simply more trading after hours, but a more professionalized market structure around it.
Bruce ATS now accounts for more than 10% of overnight U.S. equities trading by notional value. What is driving increased demand for trading outside regular market hours?
A few forces are coming together at once. First, the world feels smaller because information travels instantly, but the investor base is larger and more global than ever. News, earnings, macro events, geopolitical developments and social sentiment move continuously, and a growing number of investors want the ability to react when information becomes public. The opening and closing bells still matter, but they are also somewhat arbitrary boundaries in an always-on information environment.
Second, global demand for U.S. equities continues to grow, particularly in markets where the standard U.S. trading day falls in the middle of the night. For those investors, overnight access is not just a convenience; it is the most practical way to participate in U.S. markets during their own local day. That demand is becoming harder for brokers and institutions to ignore, because retail investors are already showing that they want more flexible access to U.S. markets.
That creates pressure up the stack. As retail participation grows and clients become more accustomed to expanded access, brokers and buy-side institutions are under pressure to embrace overnight trading before they are caught flat-footed. The business case is becoming clearer: this is where client demand is moving, and firms that can support it responsibly will be better positioned as the market matures.
We see that most clearly on Sunday nights. Over the past five weeks, Bruce ATS has seen a 239% increase in queued orders on Sunday night, which tells us investors want to be positioned for the market’s first opportunity to react after the weekend.
What are the biggest liquidity or execution challenges facing the overnight market today?
The biggest challenge is that the overnight market is becoming more fragmented before all of the supporting infrastructure has fully caught up. That is not a bad thing; competition is healthy, and multiple venues will result in a more resilient market. But it also means brokers and investors need to think about execution quality differently.
During the regular trading day, firms are used to a highly developed ecosystem of consolidated data, smart order routing, multiple venues and mature best execution processes. Overnight, those tools are improving, but they have not always been applied with the same rigor. If a broker is relying on one venue, one data source or one narrow view of liquidity, it may not be seeing the full market. That creates risks around price discovery, fill quality and customer experience. We’ve long argued that as liquidity develops across multiple venues, execution quality in overnight U.S. trading can no longer be approached through a single-venue lens.
Liquidity itself is also still developing. Spreads can be wider, depth can vary by symbol and activity can be concentrated around names reacting to news. That makes transparency and routing even more important. A one-cent difference across venues may sound small, but at scale it can translate into real missed savings for investors when brokers lack consolidated market data and multi-venue access.
How important is broader industry participation in helping the overnight session mature?
It is crucial. Demand is already there, but the market only matures when the broader ecosystem responds to that demand. That means brokers offering access, data vendors improving visibility, liquidity providers supporting tighter markets, technology providers simplifying connectivity and venues competing on reliability, transparency and execution quality. It also means buy-side firms beginning to evaluate where overnight trading fits within their own investment, risk management and execution workflows, rather than treating it as something that sits outside the core trading process.
There has been meaningful progress. Many brokers have connected to multiple venues and are building or buying smart order routing capabilities for overnight trading. Exegy and dxFeed have announced aggregated overnight data offerings, and Webull has built a consolidated overnight data experience for its users.
The major exchange groups are also signaling their plans to expand trading hours, which further validates the direction of travel. But the maturation is not waiting for one big exchange-led event. It is already happening through the ATS ecosystem, broker connectivity, market data distribution and client demand. For firms still on the sidelines, the question is becoming less “whether” to participate and more whether they want to help shape the standards for overnight trading – or adapt later to a market structure that others have already built.
What are Bruce ATS’s key priorities as overnight trading volumes continue to grow?
Our priority is to help the overnight market scale responsibly, with a focus on education, access, resilience, operational excellence and execution quality.
On the access side, we want to make it as easy as possible for brokers and other participants to connect to Bruce ATS and consume overnight market data. That means supporting standard FIX connectivity, aligning with familiar market data workflows and reducing unnecessary operational friction.
Just as importantly, we want to serve as a resource for firms that are either launching overnight trading or assessing how to improve what they already offer. Overnight trading is not simply the core session with a longer clock. Best execution, market data, symbol eligibility, routing logic, customer disclosures, corporate action handling, surveillance, staffing and operational coverage all require careful attention. A playbook that works at 2 p.m. may not work the same way at 2 a.m., and firms need practical guidance on how to build the right controls and workflows around the session. We’ve served as a consultant to brokers of all sizes that are not yet live overnight but are preparing to launch, helping them think through all of these matters.
We also want to be a constructive voice on resilience. One of the lessons of overnight trading is that single points of failure, such as venue-specific outages in heavily traded names, become more visible as participation grows. Multiple venues, multiple data sources and multiple liquidity providers help create a healthier and more reliable market. If we can help the industry solve the operational side, we believe the volumes and liquidity will continue to follow.
Looking ahead, how do you see the overnight market evolving over the next few years?
We expect the overnight market to keep growing and to become a more normal part of U.S. equity market structure. The traditional trading day will remain important, but it will no longer be the only meaningful access window for U.S. equities.
Over the next few years, we expect more brokers to offer overnight access, more firms to connect to multiple venues, more sophisticated routing and data tools to become standard and more institutional participation as the operational framework matures. We also expect the market to become more disciplined. That means clearer expectations around market data, best execution, resilience, surveillance and customer experience.
The broader direction is toward always-available markets. That does not mean every market needs to move to 24/7 tomorrow. It means investors increasingly expect access that reflects how information actually moves. One of our goals is to help make that evolution responsible, competitive and durable, with institutional-grade infrastructure, meaningful liquidity and the guardrails brokers and investors need to trade with confidence.
