Market hours
Family VII · Market & styles
Not to be confused with after hours, trading hours.
Market hours are the scheduled periods during which a trading venue accepts orders and executes trades. They are set by each exchange or trading system and differ by asset class, country and session, so a single global timetable does not exist. Outside these periods, orders may be queued but not matched.[1]
How market hours are structured
Most venues define a regular session, and many add pre-market and post-market sessions with different rules. Within a session, an opening auction and a closing auction may set the first and last prices. Market hours are usually stated in the venue's local time zone, so a trader in another region must convert them.
- Regular session — the main continuous trading period.
- Extended sessions — pre-market and post-market periods, often with thinner liquidity and wider spreads.
- Auction periods — brief windows where orders are collected and a single price is determined.
Holidays, half-days and emergency closures are announced by the venue and override the normal timetable.
Worked example: converting a session to another time zone
A trader in London follows a US equity venue whose regular session runs 09:30–16:00 New York time. On a day when New York is on daylight saving time (UTC−4) and London is on British Summer Time (UTC+1), the time difference is five hours.
The same venue in winter, when New York is UTC−5 and London is UTC+0, opens at 14:30 and closes at 21:00 London time as well, because both regions change clocks. If one region changes and the other does not, the window shifts by one hour.
What market hours do not cover
Market hours apply to the venue, not to the broker. A broker may accept orders outside market hours for queuing, and may route certain orders to other venues with different hours. Settlement and clearing operate on separate schedules. Crypto venues often run continuously, so the concept of a daily session does not apply in the same way.
Often confused with
- after hours
- After hours refers to trading that occurs outside a market's regular session, typically on electronic venues with thinner volume, wider spreads and different rules that vary by exchange and instrument.
- trading hours
- Trading hours are the fixed periods during which a venue accepts and matches orders for a listed instrument, set by the exchange or by the individual broker's routing arrangements.
See also
References
- ↑ Trading hours published by the exchanges and venues concerned. Session boundaries shift with daylight saving in each region and are not the same all year.