A Night Owl's Guide to After-Hours Trading: Update

Online investors don't have to wait any longer to get in on after-hours trading.

Although it looked like extended trading was going to get held up by bricks-and-mortar bureaucracy, in the past few weeks online brokerages -- and even one small regional stock exchange -- have gotten things moving.

Wednesday, MarketXT, formerly Eclipse Trading, announced that it would be offering extended trading hours to clients of Dreyfus and Discover, bringing retail investors further into the after-hours hubbub. From 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. EDT, MarketXT will host trading for the top 100 S&P stocks and the top 100 Nasdaq stocks.

Online Trading's After-Hours Club
Brokerage	Platform	Details
Datek Online	Island ECN	8 a.m. to 8 p.m., effective Sept. 15. Nasdaq stocks, limit orders only.
Dreyfus Brokerage, Discover Brokerage	MarketXT Trading	6 p.m. to 8 p.m., Monday to Thursday, effective Aug. 25. Top 100 S&P and Nasdaq issues, limit orders only.
E*Trade	Instinet	4 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., planned for September. Nasdaq and NYSE stocks. Limit orders only.
TD Waterhouse	Island ECN	Not available; postponed to October. Nasdaq stocks, limit orders only.
Fidelity, DLJdirect, Charles Schwab	Revamped RediBook ECN	Still in development.
Wit Capital	Proprietary system	6 or 7 p.m. to 10 p.m, planned for November. Nasdaq- and NYSE-listed stocks, limit orders.
CyberBroker	Island, Nextrade, MarketXT, others	8 a.m. to 8 p.m., effective September. NYSE and Nasdaq stocks, limit orders only.
Onlinetradinginc.com	Nextrade ECN	24 hours, effective April. Nasdaq stocks, limit orders only. Or from 5:15 p.m. to 9 a.m., NYSE-listed stocks, limit orders only. Also offers Instinet before and after market opens.

On Aug. 20, the Chicago Stock Exchange said it would extend trading hours for certain stocks by two and a half hours. That came on the back of the Aug. 19 news from TD Waterhouse (TWE) that it planned to get an after-hours trading session up within six weeks.

It was only two days before, on Aug. 17, that E*Trade (EGRP) announced its plans to let clients trade until 6:30 p.m. EDT. E*Trade will offer the service in conjunction with Instinet, which traditionally has been an after-hours trading vehicle for institutional clients and professionals.

Some broker-dealers, such as Siebert Financial (SIEB), already allow their customers to place trades after hours with a broker through Instinet, a unit of Reuters (RTRSY).

But the first after-hours online investing at a major brokerage began at Datek Online in mid-July through the firm's Island electronic trading system from 4 p.m. to 5:15 p.m. EDT. While some online investors at first said they had a hard time getting orders filled, Datek said recently that volume has been increasing.

Stock Exchanges
Chicago Stock Exchange	4 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., effective Oct. 1. All S&P 100 and Nasdaq 100 issues, and 50-100 of the most active non-S&P 100 and non-Nasdaq 100 issues, limit orders only.
Nasdaq	Not committing to a timeline.
NYSE	Not until well into 2000.

Like Instinet, Island is one of nine electronic communications networks that electronically match buy and sell orders. It's majority owned by Datek. TD Waterhouse has a small stake in the system, which has challenged Instinet's leader position during the past two years by attracting investors in heavily traded Internet stocks. Like Instinet, the Island system is open for trading both before and after the market closes, drawing orders from the broker-dealers and daytrading firms that are its subscribers.

It's these electronic trading systems that online brokerages seem to be leaning on as an outlet for extended trading. They haven't announced any formal plans for after-hours trading, but DLJdirect (DIR), Charles Schwab (SCH) and Fidelity all said recently after buying stakes in Spear Leeds & Kellogg's RediBook ECN that their revamped version of this ECN would be central to their after-hours platforms.

In part, that's because the New York Stock Exchange has opted to stay out of the after-hours trading fray until well into 2000. The National Association of Securities Dealers, which runs Nasdaq, got the green light from its board to look into extended trading earlier this summer. But after the NYSE decided not to go forward and the Securities and Exchange Commission voiced its concerns, the NASD put extended trading on the backburner.

Four discussion groups of industry players set up by the SEC at the end of June to discuss extended trading are expected to come out with reports this fall that could provide some sort of outline for how the major stock and options exchanges will take part in the extended-trading phenomenon.

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