Some investors like to trade everyday, literally every day. They’re not satisfied with trading Mondays through Fridays, but they also want to do it on weekends (talk about complete obsession with stock trading). Other investors are just too busy working on their day job that they don’t have time to trade during regular trading days, so they are wondering whether it’s possible or not to trade on weekends.

Now, before answering this question, we need to differentiate between two things, buying stocks on weekends and trading stocks on weekends…

Buying Stocks on Weekends

Try to login to your investor’s account and try to buy, let’ say, a 100 shares of MCD (McDonald’s). At closing hour on Friday the stock was trading at $100.60. The first thing that you will notice is that the buying price will be much more than $100.60 (probably something like a $1 more or so) and the selling price will be much lower than that. In any case, let’s assume that you are insisting on buying the stock, even at this price. So you enter the number of shares (100) and you fill in the necessary information, and then you click on “Submit” to see if the order is going to be executed or not. Now, if you don’t have the heart to do this, let me tell you what will happen, the order will get executed (notice that I have used the word executed, and not another term). You will see that your account was actually properly debited.

Now the question is, are you now the proud owner of (another?) 100 shares of MCD?

Well not so fast, this is because, that while the order was executed, it was not filled, which will move us to the next topic in this discussion…

Trading Stocks on Weekends

As I have mentioned before, you were able to buy the stocks on a weekend, but your order was not filled, so the trade didn’t happen, as the system responsible for processing the trade is not on (for lack of a more appropriate word in this case). So, the question is, what happens now? Do you own these shares? Do you not own these shares? Well, technically, you don’t own anything until the next opening day of the market. When the market opens (usually the next Monday) then your order will be filled at the current price – and not at the price that you bought the shares at – so this means that your cash account may be credited or debited (depending on whether the price at which the fill took place was higher or lower than the price you actually paid for these shares) with the difference.

Note that you will be able to cancel your order at any time before the actual filling of the order (so, hesitation is allowed and forgivable when you are buying shares on a weekend).

Now, you might be wondering whether it’s possible in some other markets, to actually trade stocks on weekends. Well, it’s possible. Middle Eastern stock markets (such as ADX, KSE, and Tadawul) are open on Sundays (weekends there are Fridays and Saturdays), so, if you have an investor account there, or if your broker allows you to trade stocks in these markets, then you’re able to do so on Sundays.

A word of advice: Buying stocks on weekends is not a good idea (no investor worth his salt actually does that), this is because of the following two reasons:

1. You don’t know what your fill price will be and…
2. Markets are usually very active and very volatile in the morning of the first business day after the weekend, which means that you might buy the stock at a very inflated price.

So, unless you know something that other investors don’t know then this game can be very treacherous. Oh, and if you are buying shares on the weekend just because the company issuing these shares released a report of an excellent-not-seen-before quarter on Friday evening, then you’re already very late for the party.

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