Swedish traders want Nasdaq to cut its trading hours so they can have a better work-life balance

• Swedish traders want Nasdaq to cut its trading hours, Bloomberg reported.
• Nasdaq's trading hours in Sweden last for eight and a half hours.

Swedish traders want Nasdaq to cut its trading hours to improve their work-life balance, according to a new report by Bloomberg.

Elisabeth Beskow, the Swedish head of Norway's DNB Bank ASA, told Bloomberg that it was currently "impossible to have a reasonable family life and a job in equities." Women with children were particularly affected, she said.

Nasdaq Sweden's normal trading hours are from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., or eight and a half hours, the same as the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. The London Stock Exchange similarly trades for eight and a half hours, though this runs from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m..

Some of the world's biggest stock exchanges, however, have considerably shorter trading times. Both New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq New York trade for six and a half hours a day. JPX exchange, which operates the Tokyo Stock Exchange, only trades for five hours a day, while the Shanghai Stock Exchange trades for just four hours.

Per Flostrand, head of equity sales at Norway-based investment bank ABG Sundal Collier, told Bloomberg that traders also have to do work before the opening bell and after the closing bell, too, which makes their days longer. Staff on the European bank's trading desk typically work from 7:25 a.m. to 5:40 p.m., he said.

In 2019, the Association for Financial Markets in Europe and the Investment Association asked European stock exchanges to cut trading hours by 90 minutes, arguing that this would create more efficient markets. They said that the first hour of trading generally attracts little liquidity while the final hour attracts around a third of total daily volume. The associations also said that the long hours impacted traders' wellbeing and made it harder for the industry to recruit people with family and caring commitments.

"I've never heard such a cohesive majority being positive about the idea of shorter hours than for the past year," Beskow told Bloomberg.

Fredrik Ekstrom, head of Nasdaq Stockholm, told Bloomberg that it "would be open to" cutting its trading hours in Sweden "if it's handled in a coordinated fashion across Europe," but that the idea had been terminated in 2020 following pushback from other exchanges. He said that the exchange worried that it could lead to less business.