Hello, I am aware that Please support ALL market hours for after hours trading and Full extended hours both exist, however I was asked by Alpaca Support to file a feature request specifically for full After Hours support, as that would be much easier for Alpaca to support than full pre-market hours due to early morning batch jobs and early running processes.
So, this is a feature request for full After Hours trading support (4pm EST to 8pm EST instead of just until 6pm EST).
Justifying this feature request: Many small-to-medium account strategies revolve around trading volatility, and the volatility during after hours – despite low volume with high spreads – presents great opportunities for many of these strategies. You can see in the two links above many people saying that their strategies would benefit greatly from these hours. Personally I have not switched to Alpaca despite having fully implemented alpaca in my algorithm because there is no incentive for me to switch from my current broker, and if I were going to accept the downtime of moving my account between brokers, I would rather move to another free broker that supports full pre-market and after-hours instead due to my strategies reliance on high volatility (cough WeBull cough). I’m certain there are others in the same boat.
The addition of full after hours trading would be a good step in the right direction, as this nearly doubles the amount of time available outside market hours to those of us whose algorithms rely on trading volatility. I can personally vouch that access to full trading hours improves my rate of return on backtest significantly, so having access to this would be an immediate reason for me to switch.
Thanks!