Pre-Market & After-Hours Trading
Also called: extended hours, premarket, after hours
Trading sessions before the open and after the close — thinner, more volatile windows where reactions to news and earnings first play out.
US regular hours run 9:30am–4:00pm ET; the pre-market (roughly 4:00–9:30am) and after-hours (4:00–8:00pm) sessions let traders react to overnight and post-close news — most importantly earnings, which usually report outside regular hours. Volume is much lighter, spreads are wider, and moves can be exaggerated and reverse at the open.
Extended-hours quotes preview where a stock may open and how it's digesting a catalyst, but the thin liquidity makes fills costly and the moves unreliable. Many setups that look explosive pre-market fade once regular-hours volume arrives.
On StockSetups
StockSetups' real-time engine fires gap and gap-and-go alerts at the open and tracks each name's gap percent with the 'why it's moving' catalyst, so you can see how an extended-hours reaction resolves once the regular session begins.
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