Interactive Brokers, one of the largest electronic trading platforms in the world, has expanded its overnight trading offering to include 10,000 stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) listed in the United States. With the expansion, clients can now trade a wider range of US equities nearly 24 hours a day for five days a week, the popular American brokerage reported in a statement.

Interactive Brokers Taps Blue Ocean ATS

According to Interactive Brokers, its overnight trading hours run from 8:00 pm ET to 3:50 am ET between Sunday and Friday. The first session starts on Sunday at 8:00 pm ET and the last session is rounded off on Friday at 3:50 am ET.

Interactive Brokers processes its clients’ trades through its own alternative trading system (ATS), IBEOS ATS. However, to supplement the overnight trading liquidity available on the proprietary ATS, the brokerage has partnered with Blue Ocean Technologies, a provider of after-hours capital markets infrastructure. As a result of the collaboration, Interactive Brokers has additional liquidity from its relationship with Blue Ocean ATS.

Interactive Broker's overnight trading offering is available to the broker’s clients in several jurisdictions, including those in Western and Central Europe, the UK, Canada, Australia and India.

Speaking about the move, Milan Galik, the Chief Executive Officer at Interactive Brokers, emphasized the importance of overnight trading in providing ceaseless access to investment opportunities.

“By extending Overnight Trading to thousands of US stocks and ETFs, our global clients have a greater choice of what and when to trade at almost any time,” Galik explained. “When clients choose Overnight Trading to place an order, the IB SmartRouting technology automatically routes the order to the optimal Overnight Trading destination.”

Further, Brian Hyndman, the CEO of Blue Ocean Technologies, praised Interactive Broker’s global reach and described the firm as ‘the perfect broker’ for the partnership.

“We are pleased to collaborate with Interactive Brokers and help further our mission to give investors the ability to trade US markets regardless of their time zone,” Hyndman added.

Interactive Broker’s latest offering shows increasing interest among online brokerages to expand their offering beyond regular trading hours. Earlier this month, Israel-based eToro offered its users an additional three hours on a daily basis to trade a different set of contracts for difference (CFD) stocks. It noted that the extended hours give its clients the opportunity to act on out-of-hours events, such as earnings reports or significant macroeconomic events.

In 2021, ThinkMarkets started offering all-day-long crypto CFD trading on its platform, which included the weekend.

Growth in Europe and Asia

This week, Interactive Brokers, whose client base recently jumped 19% year-over-year to 2.29 million, integrated with Darwinex, a UK-based retail broker and asset manager. The brokerage has also made a number of strategic moves in recent months.

In June, the broker, which offers access to over 150 markets, started providing its clients with access to investment opportunities in Danish and Czech stocks. Earlier in February, the brokerage launched algo trading in Taiwan; it started offering crypto trading in Hong Kong; and it introduced shares lending to Australian investors.

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