Philippine Stock Exchange to extend trading hours starting October

MANILA, Philippines—The Philippine Stock Exchange has finalized plans to extend trading hours beginning October 2011, in a bid to attract more investor interest and prepare for cross-border trading with Southeast Asian neighbors.

The PSE disclosed on Thursday that its board had approved extending trading hours to a period encompassing 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. effective October 1.  The current trading hours are 9:30 am to 12:10 pm.

By January 1, 2012, the trading hours will be extended further into the afternoon but with a lunch break in-between.  The morning session will be 9:30 a.m. to 12 noon while the afternoon session will be 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

With the local stocks index hitting record highs, PSE chair Jose Pardo said in a recent interview that it’s timely to implement longer trading hours for the local bourse to be able to “identify with the rest of the world.”

“The countdown with Asean is fast approaching.  We’re looking at March next year to begin that process of integration,” Pardo said.

The PSE had approved a resolution to revive longer trading hours in 2008 but this was shelved due to the unfavorable economic conditions at that time.  At that time, global commodity prices were skyrocketing, thereby hurting the Philippines, a net importer of crude oil and rice. This was followed by the Wall Street-epicentered financial crisis that shook up the rest of the world in 2009.

The policy to extend trading hours was revived by the new PSE board to help boost liquidity in the local market.

The stock markets of four Southeast Asian nations — the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand — have made plans to integrate their stock markets to groom the regional block into a stronger magnet for global portfolio investment.

The PSE and three other stock exchanges namely Bursa Malaysia (BM), Singapore Exchange (SGX) and the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) aim to electronically interconnect the participating markets and facilitate cross border order trading seamlessly.

The local bourse has also prepared for an integrated regional trading with its migration to NYSE Technologies’ NSC V900 platform, a new innovative trading infrastructure that boosts the product range, trading performance and volume capacity of the local bourse.  This system, earlier rebranded as PSEtrade, allows PSE to handle larger trading volume and process trade 10 times faster than the previous system.