The Bruce Overnight Edge: Holiday Hours and a 2026 Market Prediction

Happy Holidays

As we close out an incredible year of growth and evolution in the overnight markets, we want to wish you and your families the very best for the holiday season. We look forward to continuing this momentum with you in 2026.

Market Structure in the Numbers

The nature of liquidity taking in the overnight session is evolving rapidly. This is why, in September, Bruce Markets added the Immediate or Cancel (IOC) order type. We have seen a rapid adoption of IOC orders since release. IOC orders have sometimes represented over 70% of taking volume on Bruce Markets¹.

Why? Well, that brings us to Bruce’s top prediction for 2026:

• The use of Smart Order Routers (SORs) will grow dramatically in the overnight session next year

IOCs are a key tool for SORs that facilitate liquidity taking at the best price across multiple competitive trading venues. 2025 brought robust venue competition to the overnight session. IOCs are especially important in the overnight session because markets are not linked together into a single protected quote like the daytime session. A marketable client order can sit unexecuted on venue A even if it would trade immediately on venue B at an improved price. Retail clients obviously do not want to buy stock at $100.00 on one overnight venue when another venue is offering it at $99.00.

Smart Order Routers have market data from multiple overnight venues and can see these price differences when executing your order. Therefore, using a Smart Order Router and IOCs can help ensure a broker is capturing the best price for its client across a competitive market landscape. This, in turn, helps brokers more efficiently target “best execution” in the overnight session by leveraging a SOR with market data from multiple overnight ATS venues.

Bruce Notes

• Contact sales@brucemarkets.com if you are interested in adding Bruce Market Data
• End of Year Holiday Schedule
  • Wednesday December 24, 2025 - No overnight session
  • Thursday December 25, 2025 - Regular overnight session starting at 8:00pm ET
  • Wednesday December 31, 2025 - No overnight session
  • Thursday January 1, 2026 - Regular overnight session starting at 8:00pm ET

The Bruce Markets Team

¹ All data is from internal Bruce ATS sources through trade date 12/24/2025