On one hand, a demand for work-life balance among professionals – not least in trying to recruit the young generation to post-trade operations. On the other hand, a large and growing role for retail investors in supporting the liquidity of small-volume securities, with their trading largely handled off office hours. A session of Thursday’s Nordic Trading Conference, organised by standardisation network FIX, dug in.

The session with Nasdaq European Market Services president Roland Chai and FIX Trading Community representative Scott Charity lined out the arguments from several sides, to shine the light on an industry issue that has climbed fast up the agenda.

The question can not be handled as an isolated one. America’s, and soon enough possibly also Europe’s, move from T+2 to T+1 settlement is one of the factors already squeezing the time margin for settlement. The state of new, hopefully better, system solutions is also at the core of the development. At the end of the day, any decision to cut or prolong trading hours at the large marketplaces will depend of the weights given to voices from various types of stakeholders on both buy- and sell-side, and their service providers.

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Scott Charity is Co-Chair Global Member Services Committee, FIX Trading Community, Senior Market
Intelligence Specialist and Regulatory Affairs, Berenberg

The conference’s policy does not, by default, permit direct quotes.