How We Source Our Data

Trading hours

Regular session times for each exchange — including midday lunch breaks in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai — are taken from the official published schedules of the exchanges themselves. Each market's hours are stored in its own local time, exactly as the exchange publishes them.

We review these schedules whenever an exchange announces a change. For example, when the Tokyo Stock Exchange extended its closing time from 3:00 PM to 3:30 PM in November 2024, our data was updated to match.

Time zones and daylight saving

Live statuses are computed in your browser using the IANA Time Zone Database — the same authoritative source used by operating systems worldwide. Because every calculation is done in each exchange's own time zone, daylight saving transitions in the US, UK, Europe, and Australia are applied automatically on the correct local dates. We never hard-code UTC offsets.

This matters most during the few weeks each spring and autumn when the US and Europe change their clocks on different dates and the usual gaps between markets temporarily shift by an hour.

Holiday calendars

Exchange holidays come from two methods, depending on the market:

• Rule-based holidays — US, UK, European, Swiss, Australian, and Japanese market holidays follow fixed, published rules (for example, "the third Monday of January" or "the Friday before Easter"). We compute these directly from the rules, including observed-day shifts when a holiday falls on a weekend, so coverage extends automatically into future years.
• Official calendar holidays — Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and India follow lunar and religious calendars that cannot be computed from simple rules. For these markets we maintain curated date lists taken from each exchange's officially published holiday calendar, and update them when the next year's calendar is released.

The full list is browsable on our Market Holidays page.

What the live status means

• Open — the exchange is in its regular continuous-trading session right now.
• Lunch Break — the market day is underway but trading is paused for the exchange's scheduled midday break (Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai).
• Pre-Market / After Hours — extended electronic trading may be available, but the regular session is not running.
• Closed — outside trading hours, on a weekend, or on an exchange holiday (the holiday's name is shown when applicable).

Corrections

If you spot an error — a wrong session time, a missing holiday, or an incorrect conversion — please tell us via the contact page. We verify reports against the exchange's official schedule and correct confirmed errors promptly.

What this site is not

Global Markets 24 Hours is a reference for market schedules and trading education. We do not provide investment advice, price predictions, or brokerage services, and nothing on this site should be read as a recommendation to buy or sell any security.