As the number of shopping days until Christmas ticks down metronomically, it is easy to forget (if you’re old) or may surprise you to know (if you’re young), that UK shops have only been allowed to open on Sundays since 1994, even pubs could not open all day on Sunday the way they do today. Sunday was the day of rest. But that was a long time before the internet changed everything and it became possible to shop for almost anything, from the comfort of your own home, any time…even shopping for shares.
In Germany, they are very good at this and it has become big business. Several entrepreneurial firms have formed strategic partnerships with the regional stock exchanges in order to create retail platforms* that sit behind trading apps.
Chart: European Retail ETF growth
Not only can you trade German shares on these platforms, but shares from all over the world (they are particularly popular for trading ETFs, see the chart above) and like the restrictive opening hours of shops and pubs in the old days, these share trading platforms have extended beyond the traditional opening and closing times, now facilitating trading outside of normal exchange trading hours.
On trend, Frankfurt-based Deutsche Börse took an "if you can't beat them, join them" approach, launching a retail segment on Xetra, also recently extending trading hours.
Our talented technical team has found a way to see what this means for retail volume profiles. This means dividing the day into time buckets and counting the shares/value traded in each bucket. It is a time consuming job but thankfully we have a lot of abacuses (or is it abaci?) and you can see the results in the below chart.
Chart: Xetra Retail ETF Volumes - November versus December 2025
What does seem to be evident (although one month on month comparison may not tell us the whole story) is that extending the hours was additive not only before and after normal exchange hours but resulted in more volume for Xetra in every intra-market time bucket, once the change was introduced.
We will share more details of this study in the new year but in the meantime as we see Nasdaq seeking to extend market hours and days, it seems no one needs to rest any more when they could be shopping.
Please contact us here to find out more.
* Note that to see the full retail picture in the German retail market we capture data from: Tradegate, Lang und Schwarz, Gettex, Stuttgart, Quotrix, Dusseldorf, Munich, Hamburg and Hannover as well as Xetra, Frankfurt and Berlin.
