Shanghai Stock Exchange

Shanghai had a thriving stock market in the early twentieth century — for a time the largest in Asia — but it was closed in 1949 after the founding of the People's Republic. The modern Shanghai Stock Exchange opened on December 19, 1990, one of the signature institutions of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, beginning with just eight listed stocks known affectionately as the 'old eight'. In three decades it has grown into one of the world's largest markets by total value, listing the giants of China's state-owned economy — banks, insurers, energy and telecom companies — alongside a rising cohort of private industrial and technology firms.

A landmark addition came in 2019 with the STAR Market, a NASDAQ-style board for science and technology companies that pioneered registration-based IPOs in China, loosening the state's traditional control over who may list and at what price. The exchange remains distinct from its sibling in Shenzhen, which skews toward smaller private companies; Shanghai is the venue of the establishment heavyweights.

Shanghai trades from 9:30 AM to 11:30 AM and 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM local time (UTC+8, with no daylight saving), with an opening call auction from 9:15 AM and a closing auction in the final three minutes. Two rules give the market a rhythm all its own: daily price limits — most stocks may rise or fall no more than 10% in a day (20% on the STAR Market), at which point they lock at the limit — and the T+1 rule, under which shares bought today cannot be sold until tomorrow, a restriction designed to damp speculative churn.

Access for foreign investors is channelled rather than open: through the Stock Connect link with Hong Kong, through qualified institutional investor programmes, or not at all for certain share classes. The investor base is also unusual — individual retail investors account for a far larger share of trading than in Western markets, contributing to bursts of momentum and sentiment-driven swings that professional investors elsewhere rarely see on such a scale.

Mainland-listed shares — A-shares, denominated in yuan — long existed in a parallel universe from the rest of world markets, but that has changed: global index providers began including A-shares in emerging-market benchmarks in 2018, obliging international funds to hold Shanghai-listed stocks. The SSE Composite, covering every stock on the exchange, is the number quoted daily as shorthand for the Chinese market, while the CSI 300 (spanning Shanghai and Shenzhen) is the institutional benchmark.

Shanghai's session ends at 3:00 PM local time — before Europe opens — so its close is an early input into each global trading day, and policy signals from Beijing frequently move the market more than corporate earnings do. For global investors, the exchange is the most direct window onto the world's second-largest economy, with dynamics — price limits, retail dominance, policy-driven cycles — that make it one of the most distinctive major markets anywhere.