ViewTrade’s James St. Clair on the Infrastructure Powering 24-Hour Markets

For decades, global investing operated within rigid windows shaped by geography, settlement cycles, and market hours. James St. Clair has spent nearly 40 years working inside those systems, first in retail brokerage and later helping institutions navigate cross-border access to U.S. markets. From that vantage point, he has watched the slow constraints of time and location give way to infrastructure built for continuous participation.
St. Clair is the co-founder and a longtime executive at ViewTrade, a firm that operates largely behind the scenes, providing the technology that allows financial institutions around the world to offer their clients access to U.S. and international markets. Founded in 1999, ViewTrade focuses on enabling cross-border trading for retail investors through a business-to-business model, supporting more than 300 brokers, banks, and wealth platforms across over 30 countries.
The firm’s origins trace back to a straightforward request from an overseas client. “About 26 years ago, the idea of ViewTrade came about working with an institutional client of ours overseas in Europe,” St. Clair said. “They were looking for access to the U.S. market for their online division, and we helped them create that portal.” That early work revealed a broader opportunity, providing non-U.S. investors with reliable access to U.S. markets through local institutions.
Over time, that access has expanded beyond traditional trading hours. Overnight trading, once limited primarily to futures and institutional hedging strategies, has increasingly become a retail-driven activity. The shift has been particularly pronounced in regions such as Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, where U.S. overnight hours align with local daytime trading.
“When we call it overnight, that’s their daytime,” St. Clair said. “Their ability to participate in that overnight session is absolutely dominated by self-directed retail investors.” Many of those investors want more control over how and when they react to market events, especially when trading familiar U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds.
The appeal extends beyond convenience. Markets now respond to a constant stream of information, from earnings releases and central bank decisions to geopolitical developments and social media posts that can move prices within minutes. Waiting for the U.S. market to open can mean reacting after prices have already adjusted.
“If a client has to wait eight or ten hours for the markets to open to react, someone has already reacted,” St. Clair said. “Allowing clients to participate during these market-moving events is what’s driving it.”
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Concerns around liquidity and volatility have historically limited overnight participation, but St. Clair argues those dynamics have changed for the most actively traded securities. Highly liquid stocks and major ETFs now trade substantial volumes overnight, helping smooth price discovery ahead of the U.S. open. “That overnight session has kind of ironed all of that out,” he said, noting that many stocks have already traded for hours before the opening bell.
Risk remains a consideration, particularly in less liquid names. St. Clair emphasized that manipulation remains a concern when trading volumes are thin. “There is a really high risk of manipulation in the less liquid names,” he said, adding that careful monitoring is essential to protect investors.
That oversight increasingly depends on artificial intelligence. ViewTrade uses AI across compliance, risk management, and fraud detection, particularly during overnight hours when human staffing is limited. “No team of people can keep an eye on the volumes we’re seeing,” St. Clair said. AI systems help detect patterns associated with layering, spoofing, and other forms of market manipulation, while also flagging unusual changes in client activity.
Beyond surveillance, ViewTrade’s infrastructure enables its clients to deploy AI-driven tools that improve the investor experience. These include automated onboarding, real-time account support, and explanations that help investors understand why their portfolios change and what factors are influencing performance. St. Clair views AI as a complement to human judgment rather than a replacement.
“Advisors don’t become less important,” he said. “They become more human.”
At the core of ViewTrade’s approach is an API-first, modular technology stack that institutions can assemble based on their existing capabilities. St. Clair likens it to a set of building blocks designed to fill gaps without requiring firms to rebuild their systems. “If you’re trading in the post-market until 8 p.m., a minute later you’re in the overnight session, which is tomorrow’s trading day,” he said. “If your systems can’t reset and flip over, that’s why some firms stop at 23.5 hours. We’ve worked through that.”
The demand for continuous access is being reinforced by a global wealth transfer toward younger, digital-native investors who expect real-time insight rather than periodic updates. ViewTrade’s role, St. Clair said, is to provide the infrastructure that allows platforms to meet those expectations without sacrificing compliance or operational stability.
Looking ahead, St. Clair expects overnight trading to become a standard feature rather than a differentiator. “Three years from now, we won’t really be talking about the overnight session,” he said. “It’s just going to be trading.”
For ViewTrade, that normalization reflects years spent building the systems that quietly support global participation. By enabling access to the world’s most liquid markets across time zones, the firm is helping reshape how investing works, not through headlines or predictions, but through infrastructure that stays active long after markets once closed.