Forced to trade on company time? The NASDAQ may have a solution for
you.
Thursday May 20, 1:40 pm Eastern Time
Nasdaq panel details evening trading
proposal
NEW YORK, May 20 (Reuters) - A Nasdaq committee plans to
propose that the exchange offer after-hours trading starting at 5:30
p.m.(2130 GMT) Monday through Thursday, a spokesman at the
nation's second-largest stock market told Reuters on Wednesday.
Wall Street is racing to capture the bulge of Internet trades placed after traditional hours.
Demand from small, or ''retail,'' investors has soared as people come home from work and
look to execute trades over the Internet.
The proposal would give investors an extra three and a half hours to trade stocks on
weekdays. The exchange would remain closed after hours on Fridays.
Nasdaq has said that if the proposal is approved, late trading could come ''conceivably'' by
this summer. But the proposal has several big hurdles to face.
The proposal first must be approved when it is presented by Nasdaq's Quality of Markets
Committee to the board of Nasdaq on Wednesday, May 26.
If approved, it would be sent the next dayr to face the National Association of Securities
Dealers (NASD) board of governors. The NASD is the parent of the Nasdaq Stock Market
and the American Stock Exchange.
The late trading proposal would then move to the U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission, which could take weeks of public comment and regulatory probing before
approval.
SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt said in late April he would prefer that late trading be tabled
until after the threat from the millennium computer glitch has passed. But ''if one of the
exchanges wanted to implement longer hours before that, I would hope the commission
would be responsive to that request,'' he said at the time.
An earlier version of the proposal had aimed to start the late trading session a half-hour
earlier, at 5 p.m. (2100 GMT or 2200 GMT, depending on time of year) through 9 p.m.
(0100 or 0200 GMT).
The latest version would also give traders Fridays off, when market liquidity tends to thin. |
