(Bloomberg) — Charles Schwab Corp. is expanding overnight trading to all of its retail clients as it seeks to capture demand from investors piling into US stocks amid elevated prices.
Schwab’s retail clients will be able to trade a wider range of securities 24 hours, five days a week, the firm said in a statement. Those include shares of companies in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 as well as hundreds of exchange-traded funds, according to the Westlake, Texas-based company.
“Think of it as an extension of the trading day,” James Kostulias, head of trading services at Schwab, said in an interview. “This is the next step and evolution for us at a time when there is enough liquidity in the market that is good for clients.”
Schwab ran a pilot of the program with about 80,000 clients from November through January. The most active trading hours of the overnight session in the pilot were between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. New York time and 3 a.m. and 4 a.m.
Shares that Schwab clients most actively traded during the pilot were Tesla Inc., Nvidia Corp., Palantir Technologies Inc., MicroStrategy Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., according to Schwab.
Extended trading hours, also known as overnight trading, have become more common since the pandemic fueled a surge in amateur investing. Robinhood Markets Inc. and Interactive Brokers Group Inc. have started enabling customers to buy and sell US stocks 24 hours a day, five day a week, to cater to investors eager to react to market-moving events immediately.
“If you see new emerging names or news announcements, you might see a bit of deviation from the symbols traded during the standard trading day,” Kostulias said. Schwab’s busiest trading night in the pilot came when Chinese AI company DeepSeek announced it could operate at a fraction of its competitors’ costs, he said. After the news broke, 20,000 trades were placed from the evening of Sunday, Jan. 26, into Monday, Jan. 27.