The Bruce Overnight Edge: Under Retail Pressure

The Bruce Overnight Edge: Under Retail Pressure

March 13, 2026 - Chicago, IL

Happy Birthday to Us!

On the evening of March 10, 2025 Bruce ATS executed its first trade. A clearly very smart early adopting Bruce ATS Subscriber bought 1 share of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) for $94.77. One year later, AMD closed at $204.83 for a profit of $110.06 or 116%. Let’s hope this Subscriber held their long position.

Here at Bruce Markets, we are celebrating our birthday by looking at some impressive first year totals:

  • $24B Traded Notional
  • 424M Shares Traded
  • 4k Symbols Traded
  • 5.4M Executions
  • 1.4T Shares Ordered
  • 83T Ordered Notional
  • 2.2B Orders

Even more exciting than some of these totals is the fact that they are accelerating into year two. We have come a long way and look forward to the growth ahead. Bruce ATS is deeply appreciative of our Subscribers and partners. Thank you for being a part of our journey so far and we look forward to all that is to come.

Under Retail Pressure

In order to understand interactions on Bruce ATS, we attempt to classify trade participants into one of three segments: Retail, Proprietary/Market Maker, and Agency Broker. This internal classification is not perfect, but we do believe it to be informative. We first discussed this classification in BOE-14 when we shared statistics about Retail interactions on Bruce ATS (if you missed that BOE and would like a copy, contact sales@brucemarkets.com).

Today, we want to share numbers about retail “pressure”. What symbols are directionally hot for Retail investors so far in March? To do so, we looked at all Retail trades from March 1st to March 12th for symbols with at least 50k shares traded on Bruce ATS. We then filtered this list for symbols that had pronounced directional pressure defined as 2x more buying than selling or vice-versa. This translates to a buy:sell ratio above 2.0 or below .33.

Retail traded 2,853 unique symbols in this time period and only 24 met the conditions to qualify as having “pressure”. These symbols traded 4.5M shares and $95M in notional.

Figure 1: Retail Pressure Symbols

Figure 1

Observations

  • 20 of the 24 Symbols represent Retail buying pressure
  • 16 of 24 Symbols are levered ETFs with 7 of the symbols being single stock levered ETFs
  • 15 of 24 Symbols represent a Bullish outlook
  • 22 of 24 Symbols had a lower average price than the overall average trade price on Bruce ATS in this time period ($55.33)
  • Three major groups are represented strongly in this list including 1) Gas & Oil, 2) Bitcoin, and 3) Indexes.
  • Only 1 of the 24 active Retail symbols (BITX) cracked our Top Ten Symbols by Notional or Volume this week.

On balance, it appears that Retail trading on Bruce ATS is relatively stable without massive directional bias. Retail bias has been largely bullish in March and is often expressed with lower-priced leveraged and inverse ETFs.

By The Numbers

Weekly Top Ten Symbols1

Weekly Top Ten

Bruce Notes

  • We appreciate all the feedback received from BOE readers since our first edition. We listen closely to it all. If there is a topic you would like us to explore in a future BOE, we are open to suggestions (contact sales@brucemarkets.com).

The Bruce Markets Team

1Top Ten data is from internal Bruce ATS sources through trade date 03/13/2026.