The Bruce Overnight Edge: Driven by Client Demand

Validating Conventional Wisdom

We often hear the narrative that “the overnight market is a retail-driven market.” At Bruce Markets, we wanted to move beyond anecdotes and look at the hard data available to us. To do this, we classified shares traded on Bruce ATS into one of three segments: Retail, Proprietary/Market Maker, and Agency Broker. While no classification is perfect, we believe this classification is highly informative.

Retail in the Night¹

It is important to remember that every trade has two sides. In calculating these overall percentages we double counted the shares on a given trade by attributing them to both the buyer segment and the seller segment before dividing by the total double counted shares traded.

We believe that retail 51.94% shares traded is an enormous percentage of “on ATS” retail flow that is not rivaled in other market sessions. Overnight is providing direct access to retail flow.

The headline number is only part of the story. When we dig into how these segments interact, the data overwhelmingly supports the notion that retail is the engine of the overnight session.

Unlike the daytime session, where institutional and other professional flow often dominates price formation, the overnight session sees retail investors taking an active role in price discovery.

This level of two-way retail interaction—where over 20% of all trades are retail buying directly from retail—is unique to the overnight market and supports the belief that the demand is organic and widespread.

Bruce On Tour

On Wednesday, January 28th, our CEO Jason Wallach participated in the SIFMA Roundtable: Building the Roadmap to 24/7 Trading. Senior leaders from banks, market makers, exchanges, and ATSs came together to tackle the operational, technological, and regulatory challenges of moving beyond standard hours. The discussion was vibrant and focused on the “24x5 and Beyond” reality. The operational roadmap is being drawn, and Bruce Markets is proud to be at the forefront of this evolution, helping to shape the standards that will power the next generation of global equities trading. The whole 5-hour plus roundtable is available for viewing at the link above.

By The Numbers

Weekly Top Ten Symbols

Bruce Records

We’re celebrating these new Bruce ATS session records this week:

• 10.34% - Notional overnight market share in the Wednesday night session
• 7.47% - Volume overnight market share in the Thursday night session
• 40.9M - Orders accepted in the Thursday night session
• $2.2T - Ordered notional in the Thursday night session

We’re also celebrating a number of monthly records:

• 100M - January Shares Traded (+114%)
• $5B - January Notional Traded (+67%)
• 5.9K - January Symbols Ordered (+64%)

Bruce Notes

Contact sales@brucemarkets.com for more information on our market data or market quality.

The Bruce Markets Team

¹ All data is from internal Bruce ATS sources through trade date 01/30/2026.