Wanting to reach an increasingly growing group of young traders who care about investing anywhere and at any time, Robinhood was the first to introduce the possibility of 24/5 trading on single-name stocks in the USA. The popular trading platform introduced the Robinhood 24 Hour Market service in May. After a trial period, it is now available to all Robinhood customers.
Robinhood Introduces 24 Hour Market for All Customers
In the current service version, customers can use 43 of the most popular stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to place limit orders on assets of companies, such as Tesla, Amazon, and Apple. Trading hours last from 20:00 ET (24:00 GMT) on Sunday to 20:00 ET (24:00 GMT) on Friday.
The launch of Robinhood's 24-Hour Market was announced at the end of May, and the first customers could use the solution from the beginning of June. Although the broker initially announced that it would make 24/5 trading available to all its customers last month, the launch has been slightly delayed.
"We are relentlessly focused on building products tailored to fit people's lives and make investing more accessible to everyone – not just a select few," Robinhood commented in the original blog post. "We’ve often heard from customers that it’s tough to find time for investing during regular market hours with work, family, and everything in between.”
The new service may be a way to address a decline in activity among the existing group of retail investors, which has prompted a third round of job cuts at Robinhood. In 2022, the company laid off 1,000 people during the previous two periods of redundancies. In a report released last month, Robinhood revealed that the number of users fell 8% in May. Meanwhile, the company reported a net loss of $511 million in the first quarter.
More Companies Are Offering Extended Trading Hours
Robinhood decided to implement the service for all its customers shortly after another retail trading giant, eToro, introduced extended hours stock trading into its offer. Like with Robinhood, the service concerns the largest shares of the US companies, but in the form of contracts for difference (CFDs). Individual investors can initially gain an additional three hours of trading, with the chance for further extension in the future.
Moomoo, the trading app of the brokerage firm Futu, has enhanced its services by introducing 24-hour trading with US stocks. The company highlighted that its customers in Singapore and Australia can now trade more than 100 US stocks and ETFs around the clock across five days.
This move by these companies is part of a trend among CFD brokers and retail brokerage houses, who are increasingly willing to offer their users additional trading hours. Traditionally, this market was time-limited, but now the offer can extend to 24 hours a day, and even to weekends, partly due to the popularity of cryptocurrencies. Young investors want to invest anywhere and at any time, and brokers are trying to meet these expectations.
The example of Bitcoin, which is available 24/7, has shown that investors always want market exposure. While this is not quite possible in the stock market due to the limitations of single sessions, the solutions offered by Robinhood and eToro, show that a new trend is beginning to build in the industry.
