Clear Street, the cloud-native brokerage, has added 24-hour, 6-day trading capabilities to its growing equities business, and is working on launching outsourced trading.

On 13 March 2025 Clear Street said in a statement that it had connected to Blue Ocean Technologies to expand its trading capabilities to 24-hours, six days a week. Andy Volz, chief commercial officer of Clear Street, told Markets Media that the firm had started to offer equities trading to clients in Asia a year ago. Asian clients want to be able to trade US stocks in their own trading hours, and Volz said the Blue Ocean ATS had become very popular in the region. Blue Ocean allows clients to trade US National Market System stocks between 8pm EST and 4am EST from Sunday to Thursday.

Volz said: “As a financial technology with our own platform, we were able to move to trading for 24 hours over the course of about a month.”

He continued that Peter Eliades, head of electronic trading at Clear Street, and his team have been optimizing the firm’s technology over the last year to enable the move to 24×6 trading.

“We always had the longest trading schedule of almost of any institutional prime broker and customers really appreciate that level of service,” added Volz. “We had traders on the desk at 4am in the US until 8pm and this an extension of that.”

Clear Street opened an office in London last year, where Volz said the firm has a “fairly large presence”, and also has personnel in Asia so the firm is naturally staffed 24 hours a day. Volz believes 24-hour trading of US equities is in its infancy, but will undergo “massive growth.”

“It is a trend that is just beginning, and we want to be at the forefront,” Volz added. “We have signed up a very large multi-strategy hedge fund for overnight trading, and I think we’ll see adoption from real-money, large institutional managers as well.”

Eliades described 24/6 trading as a natural extension of Clear Street’s offering and services. He said: “We have a last mover advantage with our cutting edge technology that allows us to have a ‘follow the sun’ model for execution.”

Volz said that another example of Clear Street’s technology allowing the firm to be a first mover to new opportunities was the launch of futures clearing and execution services on U.S. exchanges for global clients in April 2024. Clear Street connected to16 exchanges and clearing houses in 12 months, which Volz described as “unheard of.”

“We will be one of the first connectors to each new 24-hour trading venue as they come online,” Volz added.

Demand for 24-hour trading

FINRA and the SEC approved the Bruce ATS for overnight trading of US stocks in March this year. Bruce is offering overnight trading from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. ET on Sunday through Thursday nights.

In February this year Cboe Global Markets became the latest exchange to announce plans to offer 24-hour, five-days-a-week trading for U.S. equities on its Cboe EDGX Equities Exchange (EDGX), subject to regulatory review and industry developments. Cboe offers near 24×5 trading in S&P 500 Index (SPX) options, and Cboe Volatility Index (VIX) options and futures markets, as well as 24×5 trading in foreign exchange.

The exchange already supports extended trading hours for U.S. equities on EDGX with early order acceptance beginning at 2:30am ET and trading available from 4 am ET to 8 pm ET, Monday through Friday.  Average daily volumes on EDGX increased by 135% between 2022 and 2024 during EDGX’s early hours trading session from  4 am ET to 7 am ET, according to Cboe.

DTCC, the US post-trade market infrastructure, said in a statement in March this year that its National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) subsidiary will increase clearing hours to support extended trading with implementation targeted for the second quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory review and approval of any necessary rule changes.

Brian Steele, president of clearing and securities services at DTCC, said in a statement: “As interest in near round-the-clock trading of U.S. equities grows, we are meeting this demand by extending our clearing hours to support our clients and further strengthen the safety and soundness of the markets.”

Reducing the time between trade execution and NSCC’s trade clearance and guarantee process cuts counterparty risk. Steele added that DTCC will be working with 24 Exchange, Blue Ocean Technologies, Bruce Markets, Cboe Global Markets, Nasdaq, NYSE and RQD, as well as SIFMA and other key stakeholders across the industry, on the extension of NSCC’s clearing hours.

Growth strategy

In November 2024 Clear Street added an equity research group to its existing services across prime brokerage, clearing, futures and trading, which Volz said contributes to opening institutional accounts. “It helps us build a franchise and expand into a larger client base,” Volz added.

Over the last four years, Clear Street has grown its institutional client base to more than  600, according to Volz, and the firm expects to have more than 1,000 institutional clients by the end of this year. Volz said: “They are interested in us for our independence, technology, and for being a first mover.”

In October last year Clear Street also completed the acquisition of Fox River from Instinet, which provides a suite of algorithmic execution solutions in US and Canadian equities.

Eliades said Fox River has been integrated into Clear Street’s infrastructure. He added: “We were able to cut over Fox River between essentially a Friday and a Monday and their business has increased our clearing footprint.”

The addition of Fox River means Clear Street is clearing an average of about 3.5% US equity market volume, according to Eliades.

He continued that Clear Street is working to extend Fox River’s operating hours to meet the firm’s 24/6 operations.

Volz added Clear Street is looking to continue to widen its trading hours and onboard more customers. He argued that Clear Street Studio, a front-to-back office asset management platform and integrated prime office portal is a “real differentiator” because clients can see data in real time.

“We are working on launching outsourced trading,” Volz added. “We are actually taking our technology and expanding to global execution. We are in growth mode”

In March this year UBS closed its outsourced trading business, the UBS Execution Hub.