There’s no bell for the bond market. No trading floor erupts into applause at 4 p.m., because there’s no single floor to erupt on in the first place. Bonds trade almost entirely over the counter, through a scattered network of dealers rather than one central

Four Fridays a year, without fail, trading volume on US exchanges spikes hard enough that even investors who’ve never heard the term can usually tell something unusual is happening. The cause isn’t a crisis, a scandal, or breaking news. It’s paperwork, specifically three entirely different

Tokyo and Hong Kong anchor Asia’s trading day the way New York and London anchor the West’s, but the comparison only goes so far. The two exchanges truly overlap for a solid five hours each day, real shared liquidity rather than a passing handoff, and

Oil trades under one name and two entirely separate identities. West Texas Intermediate and Brent crude are priced on different exchanges, settle in different ways, and, as one Monday in April 2020 proved in the most dramatic way imaginable, can behave completely differently even when

Three of the world’s most important trading centers, and only one pair of them ever actually shares the clock. New York and London genuinely overlap for a couple of hours every trading afternoon. London and Tokyo don’t overlap at all; one closes roughly where the

“The stock market” is a misleading phrase. There isn’t one. There are dozens of separate national exchanges, each keyed to its own local business hours, each observing its own holidays, and each shifting its clock for daylight saving on its own schedule, if it observes