The Bruce Overnight Edge: A First Look at Overnight Volume Profiles

The Bruce Overnight Edge: A First Look at Overnight Volume Profiles

February 20, 2026 - Chicago, IL

Mapping Volumes in the Night

In the regular trading session, equites have well known “U-Shape” volume profiles that are significantly skewed toward the open and close1. This week in the BOE, we did a study to see what volume profiles might look like in the overnight session.

Specifically, we looked at year to date volume for the Magnificent (“Mag”) 7 symbols (AAPL, MSFT, GOOG, GOOGL, AMZN, NVDA, META, and TSLA) on Bruce ATS to see if there were any interesting patterns2. We focused on the Mag 7 because of the high retail interest and robust liquidity. Also, our numbers suggest that Bruce ATS holds ~10% or more market share in all Mag 7 symbols. The study included over 400k executions, 7.4M executed shares, and $2.2B executed notional.

To create the volume profiles, we divided our 8 hour session into 32 distinct 15 minute buckets covering the overnight session from 8:00pm ET until 4:00am ET.

Houston, We have a Pattern

Chart 1: YTD Magnificent 7 Overall Volume Profile

Chart 2

Looking at Mag 7 activity in aggregate, we found several interesting takeaways:

  1. The Open is 10% - Intuition told us that the first bucket would be the biggest and the data confirmed this to be the case. The first bucket of the overnight session garnered 10.1% of volume and was more than double the second most impactful bucket which captured 4.8% of volume.

  2. Steady in the Middle - Liquidity does not dry up after the open. There is steady volume throughout the entire overnight session. Every bucket from 9:00pm ET to 3:00am ET consistently captures at least 2% of total volume. This is significant considering that if total volume was evenly distributed over all 32 buckets, each bucket would hold 3.125% of volume. This is significantly flatter volume distribution than the regular session.

  3. Europe Rising - From 3:00am to 3:15am ET there is a distinct peak in the chart with 3.8% of volume. This is not an outlier. It is a consistent pattern we see day over day and across symbols. The timing of this volume spike corresponds to the opening of European stock markets including the London Stock Exchange and Euronext stock exchanges (Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels, Lisbon).

Chart 2: YTD Magnificent 7 Symbol Breakouts

Chart 2

Looking at each symbol in the Mag 7 individually, we found more evidence supporting the pattern.

  1. The Open - Every symbol’s biggest bucket is the opening 8:00pm ET to 8:15pm ET bucket. The lowest volume percentage was GOOGL with 7.3% and the highest was TSLA at 12.7%.

  2. The Middle - Again, there are no symbol outliers in the Mag 7 as all symbols show a similar steady volume profile in the middle of the overnight session. No symbol dips below 1.5% of volume in any bucket.

  3. Europe Calling - All symbols in the Mag 7 show a pronounced bump in volume in the 3:00am ET bucket. The symbols range from 3.2% (TSLA) to 5.3% (AAPL) for this bucket. All symbols check in above the theoretically even distribution line of 3.125%.

By The Numbers

Weekly Top Ten Symbols3

Weekly Top Ten Symbols

Bruce on Tour

Catch up with Bruce Markets at the Tabb Forum event ATSs and Off-Exchange Trading – Opportunities and Challenges next week in NYC on February 24th. Our CEO, Jason Wallach, will be a panelist for “The Future of Retail Participation in ATSs/24-Hour Trading”.

The Bruce Markets Team

1See Bloomberg “Stocks Trade for 390 Minutes a Day. Increasingly, Only 10 Matter”.

2All data for the study is from internal Bruce ATS sources from 01/01/2026 through trade date 02/19/2026.

3Top Ten data is from internal Bruce ATS sources through trade date 02/20/2026.