{NSE｜BSE} Stock Market {Open｜Closing} Timings In India

If you ask any trader about the Stock Market Timings in India, you could easily get the answer as 09:15 am to 03:30 pm from Monday to Friday. But there are some few more things to discuss about the stock market timings in India such as Pre Market Open Session, Trading Session as well as Post Market Closing Session if you look deep into the topic. That's what I am about to discuss in this post.

Stock Market Timings in India

Trading on the Indian Equities segment takes place on all weekdays except Saturday, Sunday and on Stock Market Holidays declared by Indian Stock Exchanges in advance. You could get much more details about the holidays in link here: NSE Market Timing Holidays

Pre-Market Session

The Pre-Open Trade session is a 15 minute trade session from 09:00 am to 09:15 am on the 50 stocks of NIFTY Index. Only 50 stocks of the NIFTY Index can be traded in this session. Normal trading for all other stocks will commence from 09:15 am till 03:30 pm.

What is the Need for Pre-Market Session?

In case a major event or announcement comes overnight before market opens, such events are likely to bring heavy volatility on the next day when the market opens. Special events include merger and acquisition announcements, open offers, delistings, debt-restructurings, credit-rating downgrades etc which may have a deep impact on investors wealth. In order to stabilize this, pre open call auction is conducted to discover the right price and to reduce volatility.
This Pre-Open Session is further divided into 8+4+3 minutes sessions.

• 09:00 AM to 09:08 AM
• During this session investors can place/ modify /cancel orders on the basis of which the exchanges would determine the rates at which trading would happen. Orders are not accepted after this initial 8 minutes.
• 09:08 AM to 09:12 AM
• In this four minutes, orders are matched, executable price is discovered and trades are confirmed. This session is used to determine the Opening Price of the stock in the normal trading session. You will not be able to cancel the orders here.
• 09:12 AM to 09:15 AM
• This 3 minutes is just a buffer period for transmission from pre-market session to normal market session.

Normal Market Session

This is the session where most of the trading activities takes place. You can Buy and Sell stocks in this session. It follows Bilateral matching session, where if buying price is equal to selling price, transaction is said to be complete. Here transactions are as per price and time priority.

Closing Session

The time between 03:30 pm and 03:40 pm is used to calculate the closing price of the stock. It is calculated as the weighted average of the price between 03:00 pm to 03:30 pm. Index closing price is also calculated by their constituent stocks closing price between 03:00 pm to 03:30 pm.