The Bruce Overnight Edge: Inside Retail’s Overnight Shopping Cart

The Bruce Overnight Edge: Inside Retail’s Overnight Shopping Cart

June 26, 2026 - Chicago, IL

The Bruce Overnight Edge: Inside Retail’s Overnight Shopping Cart

Welcome to the weekend checkout line.

This week at Bruce Markets, we studied symbols with robust two-way retail flow1. We isolated 224 specific symbols that had at least 5k retail shares bought, 5k retail shares sold, and a net directional tilt of at least 5k shares. We wanted to see exactly what was in the retail shopping cart at the checkout. A topline takeaway is that the retail cart was balanced this week. Out of the 224 symbols in the study, 108 (48.2%) saw net buy pressure, while 116 (51.8%) saw net sell pressure.

Aisle 1: Buy Pressure

Observations on the top 10 retail buy pressure symbols this week:

  • Chip Stocks (SOXS & SOXL) - In an interesting twist, both the 3x Bull and the 3x Bear Semiconductor ETF made the top 10. The Bear ETF had over 5M shares of pressure on over 50M executed shares while the Bull ETF had 128k shares of pressure on 1.5M executed shares.
  • Double Dip on Alibaba (BABA & BABX) - Retail was buying the Chinese firm’s stock and the 2x long ETF.
  • Penny Stocks (ADTX, GDC, and GPUS) - Three of the top 10 stocks had average execution prices below $0.25.
  • WallStreetBets likes Cheeseburgers (WEN) - The fast food chain Wendy’s made the list based on internet chatter similar to GameStop demonstrating how themes in the overnight session are tightly coupled to daytime trading.

Table 1: Top 10 Net Buy Symbols (2026-06-22 to 2026-06-26)

Table 1

Aisle 2: Sell Pressure

Observations on the top 10 retail sell pressure symbols this week:

  • Abandoning the Leveraged Ship (SPCH) - The 2x leveraged long SpaceX ETF had the most retail sell pressure in our data. However, it looks like retail rotated some of this capital to the mothership (SPCX) which came in just outside the top 10 buy pressure list at number 16 with a net buy of 228k shares on a total volume of over 2.7M shares.
  • Ditching Leveraged Crypto (MSTU & BITX) - Retail trimmed leveraged crypto (BITX) and Crypto proxies (MSTU).

Table 2: Top 10 Net Sell Symbols (2026-06-22 to 2026-06-26)

Table 2

By The Numbers

In BOE 29: Ink Records History; Graphite Makes It we talked about the importance of using pencil to record Bruce ATS records. We used the eraser again this week in the record book. On Monday night, we smashed several key single session Bruce ATS records:

  • Single Session Shares 60.9M (+52.5%)
  • Single Session Notional $2.1B (+16.5%)
  • Single Session Trades 379.3k (+12.6)

Weekly Top 25 Symbols2

Weekly Top 25

Overnight News

  • On Sunday, the National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) is taking a major operational step to reduce counterparty risk and better support real-time clearing in the 24x5 trading world (Markets for 24x5 Trading | DTCC). Sunday starts a 60-day relief extension window granted for clearing members to transition to real-time clearing for the overnight session. Our clearing firm, Apex Clearing Corporation, is certified with DTCC and working toward a safe and orderly cutover to the new functionality during the transition window.
  • For this Sunday, there will be no impact to Bruce’s ATS order acceptance, execution, or settlement operations. Trades will be submitted to NSCC after 1:30 AM ET as usual.
  • Next week there will be no Thursday night (July 3) session in observance of the United States’ Independence Day on July 4th. Regular overnight trading will resume at 8:00 pm ET on Sunday, July 5.

The Bruce Markets Team

1All data for this study is from internal Bruce ATS sources covering trade dates 06/22/2026 through 06/26/2026. The study utilized an internal Bruce ATS classification to separate all activities into one of three segments (Retail, Proprietary/Market Maker, and Agency Broker) and focused exclusively on Retail orders.

2Top 25 data is from internal Bruce ATS sources through trade date 06/26/2026.