The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), Asia’s oldest bourse, will extend its trade timings by 10 minutes in a bid to increase volumes. It would open for trading at 9.45 am instead of 9.55 am from this Friday, the exchange said. The closing time of 3.30 pm remains untouched.
However, the National Stock Exchange (NSE) has no immediate plan to follow suit. When contacted, an NSE official said, “There won’t be any knee-jerk reaction from NSE. We will talk to all market participants and then decide.”
According to TV channels, NSE may extend trading hours by 30-45 minutes. NSE is meeting brokers tomorrow to take a call on this.
On October 23, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) had allowed stock exchanges to extend trading hours to between 9 am and 5 pm. However, NSE showed reluctance as there was no consensus on this and most market participants opposed the change.
BSE Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Madhu Kannan said, “By opening 10 minutes early, we hope to increase focus on the launch of our mid-month derivatives contract on the coming Friday (December 18). BSE needs to act to bring back interest in its derivatives segment. This should be looked at in the context of our various initiatives for bringing liquidity back to BSE.”
The new monthly futures and options (F&O) contracts will be available on all 85 underlying stocks available for trading on BSE.
BSE has decided to change the expiry day of monthly F&O from last Thursday of the month to the third-last Thursday of the month. Also, the expiry cycle of all weekly options contracts has been changed to Friday-Thursday from Monday-Friday. This means the expiry will be on Thursday instead of Friday.
