While writing an article yesterday on how much money you can make with stocks, I was trying to calculate how much money a day trader makes per year provided he makes 0.75% of his investment every trading day, so I needed to know how many trading days approximately there are per year. I assumed in that article article (for easiness sake) that the number of stock trading days per year is 261 days (Mondays through Fridays of every week – since we have 52 weeks and 365 days, then the number of stock trading days is 365 – 52 x 2 [the 2 is for Saturdays and Sundays] = 365 – 104 = 261 trading days).

Obviously, the number above does not take into consideration the US holidays, so how many days of statutory holidays are there in the US? Well, after research, I found out that there are 9 days of federal holiday in the United States (the stock exchange has to be closed on each of these days as federal holidays are observed nationwide). I know what you’re going to say, that sometimes holidays fall on a Saturday or a Sunday, however, keep in mind that in the US if a fixed-date holiday (fixed date means that the holiday falls on a constant date, such as Christmas, and not on the first Monday of September, for example, which may be anything between September 1^stth) falls on a Saturday or a Sunday, then the market closes for one day (usually the Monday).

So, now that we know the total number of working days per year, and the number of holidays, we can deduce that, in general, the number of stock trading days per year is 252 days (261 days – 9 days).

Note

There are two federal holidays that are not observed by the US markets: Inauguration Day and Veteran’s day.

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