How PSX Trading Works

You can't place an order on PSX yourself — you open an account with a licensed PSX brokerage, which routes your buy/sell order into PSX's own trading system. The exchange matches buy and sell orders automatically based on price and time priority, the same way most modern stock exchanges work.

Orders are typically placed in board lots and as either a market order (execute now, at the best available price) or a limit order (execute only at your specified price or better).

PSX trades on weekday mornings into the afternoon, Monday through Friday, with Friday split into two shorter sessions around the midday prayer break rather than one continuous session. Exact session timings are set by PSX and have changed over the years — they also shift temporarily during Ramadan — so treat any specific clock times you read elsewhere (including this guide, if it goes stale) as approximate, and check PSX's own published trading calendar for the current schedule.

Since February 2026, PSX settles trades on a T+1 cycle — shares you buy are credited to your account, and proceeds from shares you sell are released, within roughly one business day of the trade. This replaced the older T+2 cycle and put Pakistan among a small group of markets globally running next-day settlement.

Practically, this means less time between placing a trade and actually having the shares (or cash) available to you than under the old system.

PSX-listed shares aren't paper certificates — they're held electronically in your name at the Central Depository Company (CDC), through a sub-account your broker maintains on your behalf. This is also why a book closure (see the glossary) matters: it's CDC's shareholder register that gets frozen to determine who's entitled to a dividend or rights issue.

PSX applies a daily price limit (often called a circuit breaker) that caps how far a stock's price can move in a single session, pausing or halting trading in that stock if it's hit. The exact limit is set by PSX/SECP and isn't fixed forever, so don't assume a specific percentage — your broker or PSX's own circulars will have the current figure.