Trading conditions on US markets

Updated on Novembre 16th, 2022

How to access the US market

Trading operations on the US markets does not require to open an account in US dollars: the liquidity is always available to trade on all US Stock markets (CME or US Stocks), with an immediate euro-dollar conversion and without costs.
This applies to both purchases and sales orders (exchange rate detected by LMAX at 10pm, applied by 11pm to operations on the same day).

Free realtime quotes (last bid and last ask price) on NYSE and NASDAQ are integrated in all Directa platform.

Applicable commission plans

The commission per executed order is $ 9 flat for NYSE, NASDAQ e AMEX and it is $ 15 flat for OTC.

Orders

When placing an order on the U.S. market, there is no neeed to specify the destination circuit: orders are automatically forwarded to the ECN in pre-market and post-market, while in the Regular Session, the choice of circuit for execution is managed according to the best execution criterion.

For some securities, only the Market Maker is available.

Trading hours in the U.S. markets in the pre-market session have been extended, bringing forward the opening to 1 p.m. from the previous 2:30 p.m. and an additional post-market phase added from 10:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.
Orders placed in the pre-market session - if not executed - are then automatically forwarded to the regular market session from 3:30 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Revocation of multiday orders is only possible during regular trading hours and not during after-hours or pre- and post-market phases.

Orders admitted to the pre-market session are only those:

with daily validity
with a price limit
with a maximum quantity of 25,000 shares.

Stop orders and multiday orders are available and are handled directly by the Market Makers, with the same logic valid for the Italian market, except that the "ALL" feature is not available for stop orders. Neither are accepted via ECN.

Orders at market price and/or with multi-day validity, conditional orders (stop loss orders and others) and those with quantity exceeding 25,000 shares, will only be placed in Regular Session (from 3:30 p.m. to 10 p.m.) and will not be able to participate in pre-market and post-market sessions.

Useful links

For further information about the functions of individual ECNs we refer you to their sites: