Stock trading on exchanges traditionally has delayed settlement. You don’t need to have the money and stock at hand when you make the trade, but you’re expected to provide them on the settlement date. For a long time this was two days later, but is now being changed to only one day in the U.S.

Trading on Saturdays would either mean complications for settlement, or that settlement must happen on Saturday too. Surely not impossible, but these things have ripple effects that are not immediately obvious.

> “Why can't I move money from one bank account to another on Sunday?”

This exists in Europe with 24/7 SEPA instant credit across banks and Eurozone countries. It doesn’t cost anything extra.

But getting to that point needed a serious mandate from the European Union, years of planning, and cooperation by the various governments. The effort was worth it because it’s a far better solution for consumers than e.g. cryptocurrencies or the American proprietary payment solutions like Venmo.

I'd take my EU strong from an economic point of view and without "yay sunday SEPA transfer" any day over the EU we have today. The EU is a massive failure and it's going to fall into oblivion versus the US and China: especially now that the EU voted to kill its main economy, Germany, by destroying german automakers (with the mandatory shift to EVs).

The EU produces metric shittons of rules and legislation which brings absolutely nothing of value to its citizens.

If anything I don't think the EU is something to strive for: on the contrary, it should serve as an example of what not to do. Even if this means no "yay, instant sunday payments".

…but other than that, what has the EU ever done for us?

https://genius.com/Monty-python-what-have-the-romans-ever-do...

[1] GSM was created as a European standard by the EU

Absolutely, if you discount minor regional conflicts such as Word War II.

Even if you disregard that point, though, the overarching point of my comment still stands.

I'm starting to understand why the sentiments around EU here on HN is completely different from what I hear from anywhere else.

Ah, the famous European continent that includes only Western Europe. Approximately one million people died in the process of breaking up Yugoslavia.

Even if you disregard that point, though, the overarching point of my comment still stands.

The right wording might be "there were not yet a war between internationally recognized acting EU member states". That may still be an achievement, because you cannot say the same for a lot of other alliances, e. g. for NATO.

Now innovative companies like Tesla and BYD come and just eat their lunch.

Of course the engineers that work at German car manufacturers love combustion engines. That is why they chose to go work there in the first place. That is why they had (and have) such a disconnect from the consumer market. Cars are built by people that love cars, not by people that want to get you from A to B. They're people that love the solution, not the problem.

The inertia of big companies starts even in people who are not part of the company yet. It is the people who love finicking with the intricacies of combustion engines that end up at car manufacturers, not the other way around.

you are right thou, solutionists love problems and will even create new problems if their solutions no longer apply.

"Killed itself"? Do you know VW is the largest car company in the world?

German auto makers did that all by themselves. The first Tesla Roadster was released in 2011, it took a whole goddamn decade for the German industry to react.

And now the Chinese are churning out cars at a ridiculous speed.

> This exists in Europe with 24/7 SEPA instant credit across banks and Eurozone countries. It doesn’t cost anything extra.

> But getting to that point needed a serious mandate from the European Union, years of planning, and cooperation by the various governments.

Hm, it also exists in the USA with credit "within a few minutes" across banks (the one time I've used this, it resolved within a second), and doesn't cost anything extra. Getting to that point did not require a mandate from anyone, or government involvement of any kind.

It does seem to have been a four-year cooperative project between several banks, though it is not immediately clear to me that instant settlement was a founding goal of the project so much as something that got implemented after four years.

It’s not available with all banks. Both sender and receiver have to actively sign up to Zelle. And the transfer limits are quite low.

SEPA instant credit works with all existing bank accounts in the Eurozone. You send money to someone’s IBAN which they’ve already had for decades and are accustomed to using for bank transfers. If the receiving bank doesn’t yet support instant credit, it becomes a regular bank transfer that usually clears the next banking day. (It’s like batched email delivery back in the dial-up days. As a sender, you don’t need to care if their email system does immediate or batched delivery. And of course nowadays everyone has immediate.)

The transfer limit is 100k EUR, so the same system is useful to both businesses and consumers.

I think Zelle is limited at $5k last I tried? (When I lived in New York, I tried figuring out if I can pay rent without the absurdity of paper checks. But Zelle’s limit was so low that you can’t pay a Manhattan family apartment rent with it.)

Markets have chosen to concentrate trading to specific hours so as to concentrate liquidity and to help out the professional traders. If everyone's trading 24/7 then it means you need to be prepared to trade 24/7. Having defined market hours means defined hours in which important things can happen. And since the people who work in the market can also define the hours, they've chosen to give themselves reasonable working hours.

In a world where the major markets are trading 24/7, traders need to be at their desk 24/7.

> Why can't I move money from one bank account to another on Sunday?

Instant money transfer means instantly draining someone's bank account with no recourse. Checks have plenty of opportunities to stop the money, so you can write a check on a Sunday as easily as a Wednesday. Wires are more irreversible and so you can only send those when the bank is open and there's someone to double check any suspicious behavior.

It's only the regular Joe's that are not allowed the priviledge to trade at all hours.

[0] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4453440-after-hours-trading

Changes to market structure should at least be analyzed thoroughly as we don't want any "parasitic" strategies to gain from changes.

We have instant 24/7 money transfer in EU/Eurozone using SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (well technically it has "up to 10 second" delay) and it hasn't really been an issue.

Hang Seng still even takes a lunch break.

This argument doesn't actually work; the period during which you can recover a check that shouldn't have been valid is (much) longer than the settlement period. This immediately shows that instant transfer does not mean instantly draining someone's account with no recourse. The recourse period isn't related to the settlement period.

Having worked in the industry for some years: because it's always been that way, and because the people who make financial systems are lazy and bad at their jobs and don't want to admit they were wrong.

It's happening, very slowly, just yesterday I was reading about "the first 24/7 stock exchange" making another filing or something. But the financial industry is conservative and most users are happy for it to be - sure they'll talk about how they want their bank to have a better online service, but they'll keep banking at the big four names they recognise rather than the upstarts that offer better service.

> Imagine not being able to send E-mail on Easter because nobody at your ISP was there to push bits around or whatever these banks' excuse is?

Here in Japan a lot of government systems work like that.

Still, it's an old, large and hugely complex interconnected system made up of literally thousands of banks employing millions of people and several regulatory bodies run by different federal and state administrations.

Such interconnected systems/networks are notoriously hard to evolve, especially given that, as you also noted, people are often extremely conservative when it comes to their life savings. I don't think it's fair to blame the people working in the industry for all of that or even call them lazy.

I worked with some incredibly motivated and talented people too - and saw many of them ground down as basic improvements took literally years to make it through in watered-down form, if they even saw the light of day at all. I was actually amazed by how few people in the financial industry are incompetent in the "couldn't write fizzbuzz" sense, but there seems to be a big-picture insularity where stuff that would be basic and common sense in every other industry (e.g. automated CI) is just not done.

if you want to do it on NASDAQ/NYSE/... then those businesses have decided they only want to operate certain hours

> Imagine not being able to send E-mail on Easter because nobody at your ISP was there to push bits around

emails stuck in a transfer queue somewhere is not exactly a rare occurrence

That would have several benefits:

- Remove the perverse incentives encouraging the use of the stock market for gambling

- Free up intelligent people who are currently wasting their lives on said gambling to do things that actually benefit society

- Encourage creation of some other way for people to save for retirement that isn't a casino where their life savings could disappear at any moment

That saying there are some markets where auctions do take place, as well as RFQs, etc. They work well in illiquid markets.

If the markets are trading continuously, benefits of parsing new information go to those who parse it the fastest. If the markets trade in occasional auctions, everyone shares the burden (or gift) of new information equally, and no resources are wasted in, say, building a somewhat more straight glass fibre connection between Chicago and NY, then building a sequence of microwave towers, because light moves faster in air than in fibre.

Specifically, a lot of measures to prevent something going wrong, because the the damages are far greater when moving things of great value than an email.

You technically can trade stock on a Saturday, just not using all the aforementioned plumbing of a popular stock exchange and brokerage. And you can move money on the weekends, just maybe not with the help of banks because they consider it not worth their while to offer the service on weekends.

It seems silly that bank transactions, stock trades, purchases of insurance or anything like that requires human intervention. It's like an HTTP request requiring a human to put it through. Bonkers.

Said bank employees would rather have the same number of days off we the rest do.

I knew someone who worked in KYC/AML at a well known 24/7 US crypto exchange.

Their whole team would regularly have to work weekends to keep up with the transaction requirements.

Never worked with financial transactions but I have a feeling what you said qualifies as 'famous last words'.

Surely you must appreciate how obnoxious it is when people assume that software development is just “translating the requirements into code”, right?

As a general guideline I have deleted the word “just” from my vocabulary when talking about anything engineering related. Doubly so when it’s a system used directly by humans. And double again when there are legacy systems involved that weren’t designed to have human judgement deleted from their operation.

Here’s a fun example of the complexity even when there are live humans in the loop. I’m Canadian. My client is Canadian. I sent him an invoice using QuickBooks with the option to pay using QuickBooks Payments. He pays the invoice sitting at the table with me and a transaction shows up in my books but no money in my bank account. That’s normal, it usually takes a few days to clear. A week passes and still no cash. I call QuickBooks and they provide me with an ACH tracing number; they tell me that they released the funds days ago. I call my own bank and provide them the tracing number, my bank tells me they have no record of that transaction ever coming to them. I call QuickBooks back and escalate. They insist that my bank screwed up and lost it and provide me with the same tracing number. At least after escalating I now have a direct line to a case manager at QB. Back and forth, back and forth, and eventually I get an email from a VP of Compliance at Chase Manhattan asking that I call them.

Now… I don’t do business with Chase. My client doesn’t do business with Chase. QuickBooks does business with Chase and Chase wants to talk to me about financing Iranian terrorists and FINCEN. Chase happily accepted the money from QB and gave them a receipt for it and then the money disappeared into a mysterious compliance department who, apparently, can’t legally tell me why I was flagged or what I can do to ensure this doesn’t happen again. But after a quick chat about my business and relationship with my client the money magically showed up in my bank account.

Take something really simple like a bank cash transfer. Do you really think that no one ever accidentally puts in a typo in an account number or an amount? If that happens then the transaction either fails or doesn't do as desired. Either way someone has to manually resolve it.

Take that and put it on steroids for securities transactions.

Then these transactions will be delayed anyway. You could still process 99.99% of the transactions on Sunday.

Visa, Mastercard, Paypal as operate 24/7. ATMs operate 24/7. Neo banks allow intra-bank transfers 24/7. And they deal with the fraud and AML stuff.

But overall, I would bet it’s just a low demand thing that isn’t worth it. Suppose you opened an exchange that was 24/7. Would the cost to trade on your exchange be sufficiently low to compete with the current exchanges with limited hours?

Technically, if you had a paper stock certificate, you could sell it or buy it, and if you had a bag of money, you could move it. But whether or not other people will help you is probably dependent on how much you can pay, which for 99.99% of people, is probably not worth it to just wait a couple days.

Think about real estate. It’s possible that you have a paper deed and draw up some documents and buy or sell it in 30 minutes, but the cost of something going wrong is so high that it makes sense to take a little time and use lawyers to double and triple check things.

The banks can't afford for humans to be involved in too many transactions.

What is the cost, in money time, attention, engineering effort of trying to build for five 9s of reliability?

Yes, I guess there are a few precious hours of our lives that aren't crushed under the perversity of the Protestant work cult, we should seek them out and grind them under the heel.

Because stock exchanges don't run themselves. There's all kinds of services with humans in the loop, and without these, you'd have a market with much less guardrails than the current public stock exchanges.

You can make a case for such a market being good or bad for society, but it currently simply wouldn't be legal in most countries.

> Why can't I move money from one bank account to another on Sunday?

You can in many countries! In the EU, SEPA Instant is going to be mandatory soon. In the US, I can already do this between two of my bank accounts; most banks unfortunately don't participate yet.

The larger problem seems to be that the US simply does not have customer-initiated account transfers (to third parties) in the first place. In a way, the reason why you can't do bank transfers on the weekends is that you can't even do them on weekdays either.

Nor does Google, yet somehow they are able to handle running 24/7.

Google doesn’t get in as much trouble if there’s some downtime, especially for consumer facing products

Because for you it means spending few minutes to open your app and send and order, for other market participants it means organizing holiday shifts, night shifts, and working long hours. You just cannot keep the strategies running without a human eye, the lack of oversight could be too expensive. Exchanges and banks and big players can afford that (though still, you're making some people more miserable for unclear reason), but can the small prop shop with tens of people trading on multiple exchanges do the same?