European exchange trading hours and India

For three months now, European fund managers and banks have been pushing the London Stock Exchange (LSE) to reduce trading hours by delaying the market opening time by an hour and a half. The LSE began consultations on this in December and the comment period expired last week. The Investment Association (IA) which represents the fund managers and the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) which represents the banks, brokers and other market participants submitted a response to this consultation reiterating their earlier proposal.

They are quite blunt in their assessment that the overlap with the US trading hours must be preserved, but the overlap with Asia is unimportant:

The overlap between European and US market hours is clearly evident in better metrics on market quality and liquidity during the common hours, including tighter spreads, more liquidity and improved correlations. By contrast, overlap between London and Asia is invisible from a data/metrics-perspective in regards to European equities. Whilst in theory it has been talked about as being beneficial, in practice there is no discernible benefit.

If the proposal is accepted, India would be the only important Asian market with which London trading hours would overlap (unless Singapore or Hong Kong choose to extend their trading hours to overlap with London). Even for India, the overlap with London would drop to one hour or even half an hour unless India chooses to extend its trading hours (see Appendix 1 of the IA/EFMA proposal). I think India needs to analyse its market quality by time and decide whether to shift its trading hours by an hour or so by opening later and closing later to retain longer overlap with London at the cost of a shorter overlap with Singapore. IA/EFMA state:

We do not consider that a reduced availability of trading time affects other global jurisdictions when considering their large market capitalisation and the ability to transact in their markets.

But it would be stupid for India to simply accept this glib statement without its own analysis.

Posted at 9:29 pm IST on Mon, 3 Feb 2020         permanent link

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