Your playbook for pre-market and post-market trading

Key details

• What is pre- and post-market trading: Also known as extended hours trading, pre- and post-market trading lets you buy and sell U.S. securities outside the standard 9:30 am to 4:00 pm ET market hours.
• Why does extended hours trading matter: It gives you the flexibility to react to breaking news, earnings reports, and global events as they happen, not hours later.
• Are there risks with extended hours trading: The primary risks are lower liquidity and higher volatility. At Questrade, you can only place limit orders outside regular market hours, which helps you manage this risk more effectively.
• The Questrade advantage: Questrade offers one of the longest extended-hours windows in Canada, from 4:00 am to 8:00 pm ET, for U.S. listed stocks and ETFs.

The market waits for no one. Why should you?

The big company announcement you've been waiting for drops at 6:00 pm, an hour after you've closed your laptop for the day. For many investors, that means a long, restless wait until the opening bell tomorrow, hoping they haven't missed their window.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

By investing with Questrade, your trades fit your life’s schedule—not some arbitrary number. Extended-hours trading gives you more control to act when you see an opportunity.

This is your playbook for how to do it.

Understanding the timeline: What are pre-market and post-market hours?

The stock market doesn’t just run from the opening to the closing bell. The trading day is broken into three distinct sessions. Knowing them is the first step to taking advantage of them.

• Pre-market session (before standard hours trading): Pre-market trading is the window of time before the market officially opens. At Questrade, you can trade U.S. securities starting at 4 am ET.
• Standard session: This is the main event, when the majority of trading happens. The standard hours for both U.S. and Canadian markets are 9:30 am to 4:00 pm ET.
• Post-market session (after-hours trading): Post-market trading is the window after the market closes. With Questrade, you can continue trading U.S. securities until 8:00 pm ET.

Coming soon: overnight trading. We’re working on full overnight trading at Questrade, giving you even more freedom to trade on your schedule. Stay tuned for updates!

Using time as your edge: Three reasons to trade outside standard hours

Until you’ve experienced it, it’s fair—reasonable, even—to wonder why you’d want to trade when the volume is lower and the day’s direction isn’t set.

It comes down to two key advantages: more strategies, and more flexibility.

1. React to news and earnings reports first. Major company news and quarterly earnings are almost always released outside of standard hours. Companies do this, often, to avoid causing a panic. Extended-hours trading lets you analyze the news and place your trade before the opening-bell scramble begins.
2. Trade on your schedule, not Wall Street's. Maybe you do your best thinking and research after the kids are in bed or before your workday begins. Maybe, you just don’t have time to place that trade in between your meetings. Extended hours let you fit your investing into your life, not the other way around.
3. Identify and act on early trends. Professional traders watch `pre-market futures` and activity to gauge sentiment for the day ahead. This information is available to you, too. By seeing how the market is moving ahead of time, you can set your position early or plan your strategy for the standard session.

How to execute an extended-hours trade

Placing a trade outside of core market hours is straightforward, but there are a few firm rules to keep in mind. These guardrails are designed to protect you from the unique risks of trading in a lower-volume environment.

• Step 1: Use the right platform. You’ll need a self-directed account with a brokerage like Questrade that offers extended-hours trading and a platform that can execute orders during these sessions. Our Edge platforms are built with this in mind.
• Step 2: Set up your order with the correct terms. These three settings—Limit, GTEM, and AUTO—are the ones you’ll need to know.
  
  Order Type must be "Limit": This is your key tool for price protection. You set the exact price you are willing to buy or sell at, and the order will not be filled unless that price (or better) is available.
  
  Duration must be "GTEM": Select GTEM (Good 'til Extended Market). This keeps your order active through all three sessions of the day: pre-market, regular, and post-market. If it isn't filled by 8 pm ET, it's automatically cancelled.
  
  Route must be set to "AUTO": By default, Questrade sets the order route to AUTO, which is the recommended setting. It automatically finds the best path for your trade. Choosing another route may result in ECN fees.
• Step 3: Understand what you're watching for. The risks of `extended hours trading` are manageable when you know what they are. Be aware of lower liquidity (fewer buyers and sellers) and potentially higher volatility (faster price swings), which can lead to a wider bid-ask spread (the gap between the highest price a buyer will pay and the lowest price a seller will accept). Using limit orders helps you navigate all three.

Extended hours for Canadian markets: What’s different?

If you’ve tried to trade after hours before, you may have run into a wall. The Canadian market (TSX) has very limited `pre- and post-market trading` capabilities.

• A limited post-market session exists from 4:15 pm to 5 pm ET for certain stocks on the TSX or TSX-V. To participate, your order must be a Limit order set at the stock's last close price for a standard board lot (i.e. 100 shares).

While many Canadian bank-owned brokerages offer restrictive hours, Questrade's 4:00 am to 8:00 pm ET window gives you direct access to this wider playing field.