Should Exchanges keep Trading hours?

[crazy_rabbit]

While one of the great benefits of the Bitcoin exchanges has been round the clock trading, maybe this is limiting the exchanges abilities to do upgrades, clean up their servers, and general technical maintenance.

If the world stock exchanges that are trading in hundreds of billions have exchange hours- perhaps bitcoin exchanges with the tinniest fraction as much money should consider trading hours as well. I'm sure it would be a hard sell to make, as lots of people abandon sleep to watch the market, but it might do the entire economy good.

The exchange could close outside of business hours and we would be forced to trade in different timezones. It would diversify the exchange economy, and each exchange would have a chance to address issues in peace, without panic spreading like wildfire from a few minutes of downtime.

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[DeathAndTaxes]

Should google or amazon have trading hours too?  Should email only work 9-5 M-F?  Should the blockchain have processing hours?

Trading hours like banking hours are just an anachronism from a time when those activities were highly manual.  There is no reason to not have 24 hours exchanges just like there is no reason for banks to not process bank wires 24/7.  They don't need to have a branch open to process a fedwire (which is no more technically complex then an email).  However 5:01PM EST and like magic bank wires instantly halt until the next business day.  Why?  They have a monopoly.  Monopolies don't have to offer better value to customers.  If the bank won't take your bank wire at 5:01 PM EST what are you going to do?  Hop on a plane with a bag of cash and hand deliver it?

An exchange which implements trading hours will quickly lose business to those who don't.

[bitlancr]

Exactly - one of the most frustrating things about bricks and mortar commerce is the 9-5 opening hours... I want to buy something, but can't!

If there's demand for trade at that time, and you're not open, it's your loss 

[jojo69]

yes

24 of them

[mccorvic]

No. BTC is international and all any sort of "trading hours" would do is, by definition, leave some people out of the process.  Besides, you'd have zero way of enforcing any and the exchanges without hours would win.

[acoindr]

Trading hours like banking hours are just an anacronism from a time period when those activities were highly manual.

I came here to say that.

[drawingthesun]

If the world stock exchanges that are trading in hundreds of billions have exchange hours

I think the markets close to stop the problem of small players gaining control over the price of stocks in the night when all the traders all asleep. Bitcoin exchange will never have this issue because its international by nature, same a forex, I don't think forex closes,

[Herodes]

While one of the great benefits of the Bitcoin exchanges has been round the clock trading, maybe this is limiting the exchanges abilities to do upgrades, clean up their servers, and general technical maintenance.

If a site really needs to go down for maintenance, they can alert customers in advance. I think there's several methods of keeping a site alive while new features are introduced as well.

[Elwar]

I think the exchanges should stick to trading bitcoins with other currency. Not hours.

[Timo Y]

Centralized exchanges are only a temporary fix. Once Ripple and other p2p exchange mechanisms gain popularity, it will be impossible to enforce trading hours.  

If I want to trade with a friend of a friend at 3am on Christmas eve, and there is no central authority executing our trades, who is going to stop us?

[Spaceman_Spiff]

While one of the great benefits of the Bitcoin exchanges has been round the clock trading, maybe this is limiting the exchanges abilities to do upgrades, clean up their servers, and general technical maintenance.

If the world stock exchanges that are trading in hundreds of billions have exchange hours- perhaps bitcoin exchanges with the tinniest fraction as much money should consider trading hours as well. I'm sure it would be a hard sell to make, as lots of people abandon sleep to watch the market, but it might do the entire economy good.

The exchange could close outside of business hours and we would be forced to trade in different timezones. It would diversify the exchange economy, and each exchange would have a chance to address issues in peace, without panic spreading like wildfire from a few minutes of downtime.

Let the exchanges figure out what system serves them best.  Let the users decide which exchanges serve them best.  Free market economy at it's finest.

If you don't operate an exchange, you don't need to worry about this.

[Stephen Gornick]

The exchange could close outside of business hours and we would be forced to trade in different timezones. It would diversify the exchange economy, and each exchange would have a chance to address issues in peace, without panic spreading like wildfire from a few minutes of downtime.

Camp BX closed trading during the fork.   I was not able to use the best information available at the time and trade on it because Camp BX made the decision to "protect" their customers from market influence (or ??) apparently and close all trading.

I PREFER TO MAKE MY OWN DECISIONS

From another thread:

An efficient capital market is a market that reflects all available news and information. An efficient market is also quick to absorb new information and adjust stock prices relative to that information. This is known as an informationally efficient market. Generally, efficient markets are expected to reflect all available information. If that is not the case, investors with the information may benefit leading to abnormal returns.

 - http://www.investopedia.com/exam-guide/cfa-level-1/securities-markets/emh-efficient-market-hypothesis.asp
 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis

There aren't many (or any ?) methods for a retail investor to do forex trading over the weekend.   There was one, OANDA, but they claimed the low volume was too challenging for them where they would be taking on too much risk having to take the other side of the trades:
 - http://www.forexcrunch.com/oanda-closes-weekend-trading

Of course, there is a lot of forex trading over the weekend -- just not by you or I.  Central banks, corporate and institutional (government) bankers, multinational corporations and more are all trading 24x7.

So the market is efficient for them.  The rest of us stuck with a losing forex position thanks to news that occurs over the weekend are stuck with that increasingly deteriorating position until the markets open on Monday (or Tuesday, when Monday is a banking holiday like what happened this 3-day weekend.)  

That's not the definition of an efficient market.  Market-changing information occurs over the weekend as well (with announcements oftentimes timed specifically for release over the weekend.)  Bitcoin markets don't have this restriction.    That still doesn't mean bitcoin exchanges can be considered "efficient" though.  For instance, there was a pattern called the "weekend dip" in which buyers interested in buying had insufficient cash at the ready at the exchanges in order to buy and as a result there was little buying to counter a weekend selloff until new cash arrived at the exchanges when funds sent through the banking system were credited.   Lately, however, the weekend dip opportunity seems to have abated.

At some point a financial company will start using Bitcoin as the method for moving value in and out of other assets, including offering the ability for that to continue throughout the weekend as the way to differentiate that investment offering from the competition.

[FreeMoney]

That would be such a neat feature.

"Well, it's daytime in my area and Gox is down again, I'm so glad they implemented that, I'm certainly not going to sign up at a different exchange now".

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Any exchange that limited trading hours would be the first out of business.

[crazy_rabbit]

Well, I guess that settles that then! 

[Adlai]

Note that if an exchange needs for some pressing reason to have scheduled downtime, and there is absolutely no way for them to "hotpatch" their servers, they can announce in advance that at a certain hour there'll be X hours of downtime. I'm sure that if the traders on an exchange know several days in advance about a few hours of downtime, they won't all be running to a different exchange (although some might want to temporarily secure their funds before the downtime).

This doesn't mean that we need daily/weekly downtime.

[Clark]

The inter-bank forex market is open 24-hr except for weekends.

I believe some traditional exchanges perform vital bookkeeping functions after hours, such as clearing trades and rectifying account balances. Depending upon the structure of the (Bitcoin) exchange, this could be a reason to shut down for say 30 minutes each day, probably when the sun is high over the mid-Pacific. Certain batch-processing functions could run on exchange trade data during that time, etc.

Of course there is no way to enforce an all-inclusive 'ban' on trading during specific times.

[TheButterZone]

What about user-specified trading hours?

Say I don't want trades to execute while I'm asleep, so I set 2 am-10 am Pacific as my own trading hold, then look at the charts around 9:45 am and cancel/reset as necessary before my trades can start executing again?

Or even just a big red button that we can press to hold our trades until we press it again (turns from red to green when pushed, then green to red). If there was a way to prioritize that command over the extreme lag some exchanges have...