Late nights loom as evening trade begins
Stock exchange operator makes third extension to trading hours in two years as it responds to increasing rivalry among foreign counterparts
Futures brokers will be reaching for their coffee tonight as the local bourse introduces its first evening futures trading session.
Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx), which runs the local stock and futures markets, will today add a new 5pm to 11pm session for trading Hang Seng Index and H-share index futures.
Adding an evening session will double Hong Kong's futures session to 12 hours, enhancing competitiveness and matching international trends, although even after the extension, HKEx will still fall far short of the trading hours of bourses abroad; US markets trade 23 hours a day and Singapore trades 16.
About 110 of the city's 180 futures brokers have signed up to join the night session, and they say it will be hard for active traders not to join in.
"If the customers are trading in the daytime and not yet settling their positions, then their open positions will be affected by any volatility during the night trading sessions," said a venture futures trader who will join the night trading on Monday. "It is impossible to just trade the daytime session. This is because our customers need to respond to the market whatever happens at night and we have to provide the services for them."
Some brokers have complained that the new session will increase their costs.
"Each firm has to appoint at least two senior staff and have some traders on duty," said Christopher Cheung Wah-fung, a legislator representing financial services. "The firms will need to open longer at their offices, pay extra for newly hired staff and offer some money for their dinner.