Robinhood Will Stay Open Late
Also volcano bonds, Ronin hack, investment bank interview cheating and Goldman’s office hours.
Historically there were people whose job it was to trade stocks, and they showed up at the New York Stock Exchange building each weekday from 9:30 to 4 to trade stocks, and if you wanted to trade stocks your best bet was to show up there and trade with them. Now those people are mostly for decoration, and the stocks trade on computers. But there are still people whose job it is to trade stocks, or at least to supervise the computers, and a lot of them work in New York, and it would be inhumane to expect them to trade stocks 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
So the U.S. stock exchanges still keep those traditional opening hours of 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. New York time, and most of the people and computers whose job it is to trade stocks trade stocks mostly during those hours. Not entirely; the exchanges have extended hours in the morning and evening, and I suppose technically you could meet someone at a bar at midnight and agree to sell her some stock.1 But most of the trading — and the trading that “counts,” that sets official prices and so forth — is during the regular hours.