Bradley Wong is one of the best overnight momentum traders I’ve ever watched.
He’s a senior trader at Kershner Trading Group in Austin, Texas, and has been trading for a very long time. If Lance Breitstein is the process-obsessed mean reversion trader, Bradley is the king of overnight momentum.
At least for the way I think about it.
Bradley has only done one podcast that I know of, and it’s worth listening to if you want to hear him talk through the good, bad, and ugly of trading in his own words.
You can listen here: Bradley Wong: The Insights of a Professional Trader
A lot of what I learned about overnight momentum, especially in higher-priced stocks, higher-market-cap names, and real companies, came from watching Bradley. Not the small-cap garbage that can be up 80% one day and gone the next. I’m talking about liquid, emotional, institutionally watched names that can actually move after the close and follow through the next morning.
Think stocks like TSLA, SMCI, MSTR, or even GLD and SLV.
That is Bradley’s world.
The basic idea behind overnight momentum is pretty simple:
Find stocks closing near the highs of the day, on elevated relative volume, with momentum strong enough that buyers may continue pushing the stock after hours or into the next morning.
Bradley’s scanner is not complicated for the sake of being complicated. It looks for stocks closing in the top part of their intraday range, usually the top 20%, with elevated relative volume, and often in higher-priced names where the move has room to matter.
Bradley typically waits until the closing imbalance update has come out at 3:55 before TWAPing into the trades he wants overnight.
The rough framework is:
Buy strength into the close.
Use VWAP as a guide for a stop.
If the stock gaps up, sell a good portion into the move.
If it flushes after the open, sometimes buy some back.
If it does not gap or does not act right after hours, reduce or get out.
It is simple, but it is not easy.
The key is being in the right stocks.
Bradley has always emphasized that overnight momentum does not work the same in every name. You do not want the most boring stock on the board just because it closed green. Coke or Pepsi may be great companies, but they are usually not where explosive overnight momentum lives.
You want stocks that people are chasing.
Stocks with emotion.
Stocks with volume.
Stocks with a story.
Stocks that can keep moving after the bell.
One thing Bradley does that I always found interesting is how he handles names he thinks can run after hours.
Sometimes he’ll put on more than his intended overnight size, sometimes as much as double or more. Part of that position is meant to be sold into an after-hours push. Then he keeps the actual overnight piece for the potential gap the next morning.
That small adjustment matters.
It means he is not just blindly holding everything overnight and hoping. He is using the after-hours move to lock in some gains, reduce risk, and still keep exposure to the setup.
That is what good traders do. They find small ways to improve the same idea over time.
Bradley is also one of the more real traders I’ve come across.
He is incredibly talented, but also human. When things are going well, he is usually calm, focused, and locked in. When things are not going well, you know it. Trading brings out emotion, and Bradley has never pretended otherwise.
That is part of what makes him interesting to learn from.
A lot of people talk about trading like it is purely mechanical. Just follow the rules, manage risk, stay disciplined.
And yes, that matters.
But anyone who has traded seriously knows there is emotion involved. You can have a great setup and still manage it poorly. You can be right and still lose money. You can be wrong and make it worse by refusing to accept it.
Bradley’s edge is not that he has no emotion.
It is that he knows where he excels, knows the stocks he trades best, and knows what he is trying to capture.
That is the real takeaway from watching him trade overnight momentum.
Not “buy every stock closing at highs.”
Not “hold everything overnight.”
Not “copy Bradley.”
The point is to understand the conditions where the setup works.
Strong market.
Elevated relative volume.
Stock closing near highs.
Right sector or theme.
Right kind of name.
Potential for after-hours continuation or next-day gap.
That is the game.
And if you want to build a scanner for this style, Trade Ideas is one of the best tools for it.
Bradley uses the scanners built into Kershner’s proprietary trading system. Most traders do not have access to that, but you can get pretty close with Trade Ideas.
You can build a similar mid/large-cap overnight momentum scanner by filtering for higher-priced stocks, elevated relative volume, and names closing near the top of their intraday range. Or, you can simply upload this scanner to your Trade Ideas layout and have it ready to go.
That gives you a focused list of stocks that may actually matter into the close instead of staring at random tickers all day.
SaveOnTrading readers can get 15% off Trade Ideas with code SOT15.
Overnight momentum is not magic. It is not a guaranteed gap-up machine.
But when the market is strong and the right stocks are closing with real volume, it can be one of the cleanest momentum setups out there.
Bradley Wong helped me understand that.