How Long Is the Trading Day?

Even in the age of the Internet there are still restrictions on the trading day. Not everyone is pleased with this but many traders probably welcome the forced break. If you really want to trade around the clock, though, it is possible. There are stock exchanges in every time zone so there is almost always one open. In addition, the forex market has longer hours than the average stock exchange, though even the forex market shuts down for a period on weekends.

The length of a trading day is not as brutal as you might think. However, these days need to be short in order to keep people and markets from overheating. The work of a trader on the floor of an exchange can be very intense and anything longer than the typical trading day would present a health hazard.

The New York Stock Exchange is a good example of the kind of trading hours that most other exchanges apply in their own time zones.  A typical week begins at 9:30 AM Eastern Time on a Monday. Each day of the week ends at 4:30 PM. Weeks are usually five days long, from Monday to Friday. Certain days are taken off for national holidays and the market remains closed. All in all, there are 250 trading days per year.

Can You Trade Outside the Normal Trading Day?

You can trade outside these hours. You can accomplish this by accessing other markets in different time zones. You can also trade on the forex market, which runs 24 hours a day from the time it opens at 20:15 Greenwich Mean Time on Sunday evening until 22:00 on Friday GMT.

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