What Time Does the London Stock Market Open?

No single stock exchange is open 24 hours a day. The London Stock Exchange, for example, opens from 8:00 am to 4.30 pm (UK time) Monday to Friday. 

However, there is at least one stock market open at any point throughout the day, due to the number of different regions and time zones where stock exchanges open across the world.

In the UK, the London Stock Exchange (LSE) opens at 8:00 am local trading time and closes at 4.30 pm.

The stock market is usually closed at weekends and local bank holidays. You can trade outside of your local stock exchange hours on an international exchange, and some world indices can be traded 24 hours a day with us, via spread betting or CFD trading.

A stock exchange is a marketplace or infrastructure that facilitates equity trading. The exchange is founded and managed by a corporation, private or public. It allows companies to list their stocks in its marketplace.

The term ‘stock market’ refers more generally to all stocks, or to a group of stocks in a particular region, industry, or sector.

The major stock exchanges that close for an hour during lunch are the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE), the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE/TYO), the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE), and the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (SEHK).

The London Stock Exchange (LSE) only has a two-minute break at noon, which isn’t really a lunch break. The mini-break is designed to protect institutional traders from high-frequency traders, whose split-second transactions can skew prices.

Most stock exchanges around the world do not open for trading on the weekend and instead operate a consistent weekday trading routine. However, stock market trading hours can differ depending on the culture and religious practice of a region. For example, various Middle Eastern stock exchanges are open on either Saturdays, Sundays or both.

A notable stock exchange, Tadawul (Saudi Stock Exchange), opens its trading hours from Sunday to Thursday, as the population consider Friday and Saturday to be weekend days for rest. Both the Doha Securities Market in Qatar and Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange in Israel follow the same schedule, even if Tel-Aviv have changed their opening and closing times slightly to reflect European trading hours.

The best time of day for stock trading is often considered to be in the first hour of a stock exchange opening, when there may be a larger volume of trading activity, based on recent news and announcements. For the London Stock Exchange, that would be between 8:00 am and 9:00 am.