Muhurat Trading: What the Diwali Session Actually Is, and What the Panchang Has to Do With It

Search for muhurat trading and the autocomplete fills in a date, a time, a dozen near-identical phrasings of the same question. It is a genuinely large search this time of year, on par with anything else Diwali generates. The dominant panchang publisher covering Indian festivals runs 2,828 pages of timing content, city-wise windows for every observance from a regional grahan to a district's own Chhath ghat timing, and not one of those pages contains the word trading, or the word stock. A question this many people are asking has, as far as the panchang world is concerned, no answer at all.

Part of the reason is that the honest answer is less satisfying than a table of clock times. So this piece gives the honest answer, and explains the actual, genuinely interesting custom underneath the search term, rather than inventing a number to fill the gap.

The single most important thing to get right

Say this first, plainly, because getting it wrong sends someone to a market that has already closed on the one evening of the year it was briefly open. The exact clock time of muhurat trading is not something a panchang can tell you, and it is not something this page is going to guess at. NSE and BSE set the hour themselves, by circular, usually published in the weeks before Diwali, and it is an administrative decision made by the exchanges, not a muhurat calculated from planetary positions the way Lakshmi puja's own window is. At the time of writing, the exchanges have not announced the session time for this year. When they do, the only real source for it is the exchange's own notice, carried on the NSE and BSE websites and passed on by brokers, not a computed table on a festival site. We are not printing a time, rounding an old year's figure forward, or dressing up a guess to look authoritative. If you need the actual hour, check the exchange notice closer to the date.

What the session actually is

Muhurat trading is a one-hour trading session that NSE and BSE hold every year on Diwali evening, with the commodity and currency segments running their own versions of the same thing. It is not a separate market invented for the occasion. It is the ordinary equity market, opened for a single symbolic hour on a day the exchanges would otherwise keep shut for the festival, and it is open to anyone holding a trading account, the same way any other session is. An order placed through a broking app during muhurat trading works exactly as it would on any Tuesday afternoon. The order book, the matching, the settlement, none of that changes.

What changes is the audience and the intent behind a lot of the activity. The session is widely treated as the ceremonial opening of the trading community's own new year, the market's equivalent of what chopda pujan is for a business that runs on a ledger rather than a screen. Business owners, brokerage heads and long-standing investors often make a point of placing at least one order personally during the hour, the year's first trade, in the same spirit as the first line written in a freshly worshipped account book. That is a custom people keep, not a strategy this piece is recommending, and nothing that follows should be read as advice about whether or what to trade.

What actually happens inside the hour

Once the session opens, it runs through compressed versions of a normal trading day's phases rather than as one flat window, typically a short block deal period, a pre-open call auction, the main trading window, and a brief closing session, all fitted into roughly an hour instead of the six or more a full day gets. Prices genuinely move and trades genuinely settle. But the volume that passes through in that hour is consistently a fraction of an ordinary session's, because a large share of the people placing orders are doing it for the occasion rather than for the trade itself. A single share bought as the year's opening act, a small token position, a firm's owner placing an order personally rather than leaving it to a desk, this kind of activity is common enough that it is the reason the market stays thin even on an evening it is demonstrably open and functioning.

Samvat, and why the trading community keeps its own calendar

This is the part most coverage of muhurat trading skips past to get to the market mechanics, and it is the genuinely interesting half of the custom.

Vikram Samvat is a lunar calendar older than the Gregorian one that runs most of India's daily life now, and it never actually disappeared. It moved to the background for most people while staying the working calendar for a specific community: a large part of India's trading and business world, especially in Gujarati and Marwari commercial circles, still marks its own financial year by it, separately from the April-to-March fiscal year every business now files taxes against. Diwali sits at the hinge of that lunar calendar, the point where one month ends and the next begins, which is why so much of the festival's business-facing custom clusters on this single evening: closing the old year's account books, opening new ones, and, on the exchange, opening the new year's trading with a symbolic first session.

Exactly where the year turns depends on which version of the convention a family or a community follows, and it is worth being straightforward that it is not one answer everywhere. Gujarat's own reckoning treats Bestu Varas, the day after Diwali, as the actual new year, greetings and all; a shop in Ahmedabad closes its old chopda on Diwali night and only opens the new one the following morning. Much of the Marwari trading community, by contrast, folds the turn into Diwali night itself, the same evening as Lakshmi puja, without a second ritual day. We go into that regional split in full, including why it maps onto how different communities keep the account-books worship, in our piece on chopda pujan and bahi khata pujan. Muhurat trading follows the second convention. It sits on Diwali evening itself, and is described by the exchanges and the coverage around them as the opening of the new Samvat year for the market, in step with how the Marwari trading houses long associated with Dalal Street have generally kept the turn.

A custom with real history, held honestly

Exchanges did not invent muhurat trading as a recent marketing moment. It is old enough that nobody currently working a trading floor remembers a Diwali without it, and the Bombay Stock Exchange, India's oldest, is generally credited as the exchange where the custom started, well before the National Stock Exchange existed to run a version of its own. Once NSE was established, it began holding an equivalent session, and today both major exchanges, along with India's commodity and currency exchanges, keep their own one-hour Diwali sessions on the same evening.

We are deliberately not attaching a specific founding year to any of this. Different sources circulate different figures for exactly when the custom began, they do not always agree with each other, and printing a number we cannot stand behind would be worse than leaving the shape of the history, which nobody disputes, to speak for itself. This is a genuinely old custom on India's oldest exchange, not something dreamed up for a press release, and every major exchange in the country now keeps some form of it.

What the panchang decides here, and what it does not

It is easy to assume the exchanges' chosen hour is itself a computed muhurat, the same kind of pradosh-and-fixed-ascendant calculation that decides Lakshmi puja's own window, which we explain in full in our piece on how pradosh kaal and sthir lagna decide Lakshmi puja's timing. It broadly is not, and the difference is worth stating plainly rather than letting the shared word blur it.

What is true is that the exchange's chosen hour tends to sit inside the same broadly favourable stretch of the evening the rest of Diwali's business customs use, the period after sunset when Lakshmi puja is already underway in most trading households. That is not a coincidence. The session exists specifically to mark this evening, so it would be strange if the exchanges picked a time nowhere near the evening's own puja window. But sitting inside a favourable stretch of the evening is not the same as being derived from a panchang the way Lakshmi puja's muhurat is. The exchange announces one nationwide clock time, the same hour in Mumbai and in Guwahati, whereas an actual computed muhurat, like the Lakshmi puja window itself, changes city by city because it depends on local sunset. A genuine astronomical calculation does not produce a single figure for the whole country. The exchange's circular does, because it is a decision about when the market opens its doors, not a chart reading for any one place.

So the honest answer to what the panchang says about muhurat trading is: less than the name suggests. The panchang governs Lakshmi puja's own timing, and chopda pujan's for the families who tie it to the same window. Muhurat trading borrows the evening and the sentiment of that timing, opens somewhere near it, and shares its name, but the actual hour comes from an exchange circular, not from anyone's chart.

Where this sits in the rest of Diwali night

For a business already keeping Lakshmi puja and chopda pujan the same evening, muhurat trading is simply the market's own version of the night's turning point, the one built for a firm whose real ledger is an exchange account rather than a paper chopda or a shop's counter. We cover the shop, office, and factory version of Lakshmi puja itself, and what changes when a business rather than a household is being worshipped, in our piece on Diwali Lakshmi puja for a shop, office or factory, and what actually gets written on the first page of a freshly opened ledger in Chopda Pujan and Bahi Khata Pujan. For the city-by-city computed window Lakshmi puja itself uses this year, see our Diwali 2026 city-wise muhurat table, built from Diwali 2026 falling on Sunday, 8 November. That date is the festival's; the exchange's own session time, once announced, is theirs, and this page will not be the one to print it early.

If you want to understand how this year's Diwali sits against your own chart, beyond a calendar shared by everyone, Ask Acharya takes specific questions about your own birth details, free, in your own language. And if you have not had your chart drawn up at all, a free kundali is the place most people reading this should start.