The calendar underneath the platform: Member Spotlight, TradingHours.com | An ALTALLO Perspective
By: ALTALLO Editorial · Published: 2026-08-01
Settlement dates, FX value dates, business day conventions and dealing days are all arithmetic worked against a market calendar. A spotlight on.
Market and currency calendars are no longer read by people. They are consumed by systems, and the choice of source is usually made once, by a provider.
Settlement dates. FX value dates. Business day conventions. Securities lending recalls. Dealing days and valuation points. Each of these is arithmetic worked against a market or currency calendar, and in most firms it is now worked by software rather than by a person.
Administrators, order management and portfolio accounting vendors, reconciliation and treasury platforms run most of it. The choice of calendar source is therefore made once, by the provider, and inherited by every fund on the platform.
ounded in 2015 and based in Pennsylvania, TradingHours.com supplies structured trading hours, market holidays, non-settlement dates and currency holidays for more than 1,100 exchanges and trading venues. Equities, derivatives, bonds, options, futures and currency markets. Delivery is by REST API, bulk file download, Snowflake, or on-premise installation for firms that keep reference lookups inside their own infrastructure.
The underlying facts are public. Every exchange publishes its own calendar. The work sits in making 1,100 of them consistent, machine-readable and current at the same time.
One example carries most of the point. Columbus Day and Veterans Day are Federal Reserve holidays. US equity markets trade normally, fixed income follows SIFMA's recommended close, and USD settlement does not occur. Good Friday runs the other way: the NYSE is shut, but the Fed is open and settlement of earlier trades proceeds.
Most calendar products record this in a free-text memo field, which a person can read and a process cannot use. TradingHours splits the day into separate attributes, so whether the venue trades, whether settlement occurs and whether the schedule is irregular each resolve independently. Session structure gets the same treatment: pre-open, auction, intermission and post-close are held as distinct states rather than collapsed into a single range.
A system holding Tokyo as 09:00 to 15:25 will report the market open at midday. Trading is suspended between 11:30 and 12:30.
For anyone supporting desks or clients across regions, the practical value is being able to look at a market and understand its whole trading day at once, in local time and your own.
That means every phase in sequence rather than a single open and close: the pre-open, the opening auction, any intermission, continuous trading, the closing auction and post-close. It also means the schedule as it applies on the day in question, since half-day sessions, seasonal hours and permanent changes all alter the shape of the day. A support desk fielding a question about why an order did not fill at 11:45 in Tokyo gets an answer from the schedule rather than from an escalation.
An enterprise subscription opens the full picture, including complete historical schedules and every phase type across all covered markets. Multi-seat licences are available for teams that need shared access across operations, research and support functions.
The operational case is the plainest one. Most of what firms use this data for is knowing when to expect something to happen, and when to expect it not to.
These questions have exact answers, and the cost of getting them wrong is measured in failed instructions, funding gaps and time spent investigating breaks that were never breaks. Firms automating more of the post-trade process depend more heavily on the data underneath it, because there is no longer a person in the chain who notices that a settlement date looks implausible.
A fund carries its own calendar requirements. A platform carries every client's.