The primary equities exchange in Australia.

Homepage: http://www.asx.com.au Currency: Australian Dollar (AUD)

Trading Hours Holiday Calendar

The ASX has been opened up to competition in recent years, with the notable entry of Chi-X into the field offering competition in execution venues. In addition to this competition, it is also important to note that the ASX has both opening and closing auction mechanisms which are further described below.

• Limit Buy/Sell→ShortSell
• Market Buy/Sell→ShortSell
• Market-on-Close Buy/Sell→ShortSell

• Limit Buy/Sell→ShortSell
• Market Buy/Sell→ShortSell
• Midpoint Pegged Buy/Sell→ShortSell

• Chi-X Australia

• Lot Size - minimum lot size = 1; maximum lot size = 999,000,000
• Tick Size - Up to 10c = 0.1c ; 10c up to $2.00 = 0.5c ; $2.00 up to $99,999,999.00 = 1c
• Short Sale Rules: Short sales must be declared and are only permitted where a locate for the shares has been obtained. Naked short selling is prohibited. For further guidance on short-selling in Australia please refer to Regulatory Guide 196: Short Selling
• Circuit Breakers - although the ASX has not established fixed thresholds for circuit breakers or trading halts, trading in a company's shares may be halted from time-to-time for market sensitive announcements or at the request of the company, as outlined here.

The opening auction procedure begins at 10:00AM and lasts for about 10 minutes. The reason for this is that stocks are divided into 5 groups which open sequentially as follows:

• Group 1 (A-B) 10:00:00AM +/- 15 sec
• Group 2 (C-F) 10:02:15AM +/- 15 sec
• Group 3 (G-M) 10:04:30AM +/- 15 sec
• Group 4 (N-R) 10:06:45AM +/- 15 sec
• Group 5 (S-Z) 10:09:00AM +/- 15 sec

For a detailed description of how the opening price is calculated, see here.

The closing price is calculated in the same way as the opening price. Details can be found here. Note: From 4:00PM - 4:10PM the market is placed in the same state as during the pre-open, meaning that orders can be entered, changed and cancelled, but no orders will trade.

Here you can find a number of third-party reference sources to help you learn more about the Australian equities markets.

May 24, 2013 - Report by the Capital Markets Cooperative Research Centre (CMCRC) showing that the introduction of competition (Chi-X) has been beneficial to Australian markets. Read the full report here.

• The Australian: Business Section
• The Australian Financial Review: Business Section
• Yahoo!Finance - Australia
• Sydney Morning Herald - Markets Section

• ASX Market Data