Trading sessions and pre and post market - NYSE, how is this possible

[JackSparrow]

I'm in Australia.

As far as I'm aware, the US market opens from 0030 to 0700 AEDT my time. 

IG allows us to trade pre and post market close to 3-5 hours before and post this time. How is this possible?

I'm assuming we are not actually trading on the actual exchange at NYSE/NASDAQ during this time, and are basically trading in a smaller group of traders on the actual brokerages that IG uses, sort of like CXXT or internal trades amongst other traders using IG or IG's intermediary? - as a result I would believe there is less liquidity and once the official market opens we would have more volume in this respect.

I noticed this is also only with certain shares, i.e. that All Sessions shares which I assume is due to the fact that these shares have enough trading volume during the normaly tradying day to warrant to be able to be traded pre and post market?

[Guest Austinite]

I trade with Schwab and Fidelity, they both have pre and post hours but warn that volatility is diminished and probablity of trades being filled is increased.  After markets on these platforms are handled by electronic trading platforms, not any major exchange, and only some kinds of orders are accepted, like limit and stop limit orders.  I only do Forex on IG so I am not familiar with them.

[JackSparrow]

19 hours ago, Guest Austinite said:

I trade with Schwab and Fidelity, they both have pre and post hours but warn that volatility is diminished and probablity of trades being filled is increased.  After markets on these platforms are handled by electronic trading platforms, not any major exchange, and only some kinds of orders are accepted, like limit and stop limit orders.  I only do Forex on IG so I am not familiar with them.

ah k. I do equities. I'm surprised no one has considered why this is before?

Would like to understand more of the underpinnings of the non-exchange trades - who exactly are we trading with?

If we consider market open trades to be 95% of the market, is this other 5% a group of other traders who are allowed to trade on the electronic platforms as we have access via ig?

[Caseynotes]

5 minutes ago, JackSparrow said:

ah k. I do equities. I'm surprised no one has considered why this is before?

Would like to understand more of the underpinnings of the non-exchange trades - who exactly are we trading with?

If we consider market open trades to be 95% of the market, is this other 5% a group of other traders who are allowed to trade on the electronic platforms as we have access via ig?

Looks like IG have re-vamped this page, not looked through it yet but it should answer your questions;

https://www.ig.com/uk/about-us/best-execution

[dmedin]

It's some kind of sorcery