Of course the stock exchanges themselves are closed for the weekend. But the turnover at the stock exchanges is nowadays dwarfed in size by over-the counter trading which market participants do electronically or over the phone, and I could well imagine that kind of business to be going on when the exchanges are closed, including Saturdays and Sundays. In fact, I would almost expect it to: In an age when automatic trading has become so fast that outrunning your competitor by even a few milliseconds is a significant advantage, I wouldn’t think that the finance world really shuts down completely and takes a two-day break every seven days.
Note: I know that some facilities such as NASDAQ offer after-hours trading, which operates after the closure of the stock exchange. But that is, in essence, simply an extension of the usual trading times by a few hours each evening. What I wonder is whether there is significant trading activity going on during weekends.
In my experience - and this is what I do these days - very little. Monday mornings I’m much more concerned with the Asia-Pacific close and how Europe opens.
Yes, there’s some action evenings and weekends but it’s dwarfed by the activities during normal market hours. Remember, most trades are ma and pa making changes to their broker-dealer accounts. It’s more large investors - pensions, mutual fund companies and so forth - making their moves during business hours.
Agree, activity in over-the-counter markets virtually all occurs when stock and/or futures exchanges are open for the financial product in question. So there’s some contraction of the weekend, from NY perspective on Sunday evening since Asian stock markets and moreover computerized futures exchanges like Globex are open, same for Asian markets their Friday night. And likewise during the week. Activity isn’t anywhere near constant around the clock in a given market center but there are some people in each center trading on the other centers’ normal hours. But there’s essentially zero going on in financial markets in the part of the weekend where it’s not normal business hours anywhere else.