- Robinhood will soon allow customers to buy and sell stocks and ETFs overnight in extended trading hours.
- Its 24 Hour Market will run Sunday through Friday starting at 8 p.m. ET, beginning this month.
Robinhood said 24-hour trading is coming to its platform as the company that was at the center of the meme-stock frenzy aims to accommodate time-strapped customers while pushing for wider change in trading operations.
A rollout of 24 Hour Market will begin May 16 to a "subset" of customers, followed by all customers getting access in June. Trading hours will be from 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Sunday to 8 p.m. Eastern on Friday.
"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," Robinhood said in a statement. "24 Hour Market lets customers invest when they want, on their schedule."
The program will allow people to place limit orders to buy whole shares of Tesla, Amazon, Apple and 40 other of the most-traded individual stocks and exchange-traded funds, the company said.
Limit orders let investors buy or sell a security at a specific price versus market orders under which trades are made at the best available price. Limit orders could dial down the exposure for customers to large price swings that can occur after hours when trading volume is thinner than in regular market hours.
Regular hours of stock trading Monday through Friday begin at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time and end at 4 p.m. Eastern. So-called after-hours trade or extended hours are available at some brokerages, with trading running early as 4 a.m. Eastern and stretching to 8 p.m. Eastern.
"It's the next step in evolving the market to how it should work, which is 24/7, and more like a piece of software rather than a brick-and-mortar institution that's tied to U.S. East Coast working hours," Robinhood's Chief Executive Vlad Tenev told The Wall Street Journal.