The long lunch of Hong Kong traders

last updated 8 January 2015

Hong Kong’s biggest financial controversy “isn’t about job cuts or billion-dollar IPOs,” said Kate O’Keeffe in The Wall Street Journal. “It’s about lunch.” Brokers are up in arms over the Hong Kong Stock Exchange’s plan to cut traders’ lunch breaks—which New York abandoned entirely in 1871—from 90 minutes to one hour. The brokers marched on the exchange in protest last month, smashing rice bowls to “symbolize the threats to their livelihood.” Lunch “isn’t just for eating,” says 80-year-old stockbroker Choi Chen Po-sum. “It’s also when Hong Kong brokers go out and find clients.” A tighter schedule may not increase trading anyway. When the exchange’s two-hour lunch was cut by 30 minutes last year, it had no effect. “The fact is, no trading is happening from 1:30 to 2:00,” says broker Jojo Choy. “We are sitting around doing nothing.”