Junichi - SBI Launches an After Hours Trading System

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Many people think that stock trades are conducted during the day which is usually 9 am to 5 pm. However, there are trading going on during the night time too. This article discusses about After Hour Trading System launched by SBI holdings in Japan. Before reading this article, I didn’t know about the After Hour Trading System at all and it was surprising to me to know about it. In Japan, prior to SBI holdings, Monex Inc. and kabu.com Securities Co. have been offering nighttime trading since 2001 and 2006. A daily market trading amount of Monex is approximately 2 million dollars and Kabu.com is about 1 million dollars. Whereas, SBI holing have a daily trading amount of approximately 5 million dollars which is higher than the sum of preceding 2 company’s market trade amount. Thus, After Hour Trading market scale has almost tripled after SBI launched its After Hour Trading System.

Trading hours for the new proprietary trading system, called Japannext PTS, are weekdays from 7 p.m. to 11:50 p.m. I thought that this After Hour Trading System will make the stock market more borderless. When New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) opens its market, many trades have been still made in Japan. Thus, people do not have to care about time to trade stock. In addition, if the trading hour prolongs, the stock market will expand since more trade will be conducted.

An After Hour Trading has promoted widely these few years, however, its market scales is only 0.03% of Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE). This is because, there are fewer participants in the night time trading, and it is difficult to form a trade. In spite of this, participants think that After Hour Trading System will allow them to bring innovation to the Japanese equity market, and so do I. In order to make this happen, I believe that they should make every effort to invite attractive companies to join its market and expand its market scale. Since After Hour Trading System has introduced, I am wondering that there might be an introduction of Week End Trading System in the near future.